“Congratulations,” she said. “You’re a landowner.”
I drove out to the pond that afternoon. I parked my Malibu on Vern’s field road and walked down through his pasture, through the snow, to the edge of the water.
It was still half frozen. Gray ice in the middle, black water around the edges. The cottonwood was
bare. The cattails along the dam were brown and broken.Identify Plants
I stood there in my Carhartt coat and my boots for a long time.
I didn’t cry. I thought I would. But I just stood there, breathing, and looked at it.
Mine.
We drove four treated posts into the muck the last week of March.
Vern brought a post driver on the back of his skid loader. A big steel weight on a slide. He set it on
top of each post, and I held the post steady, and he dropped the weight. Bang. Bang. Bang. Each post went six feet into the mud at the edge of the pond.
