I know she thinks about it because I do too.  She’s 96 and I’m 37 and at the end of this year she’ll be 97 and I’ll be 38. Her name is Laura Ruth but I call her Me Ma.  My name is Heather Ruth but I go by Heather. 

We were refugees together.  She, in her 60s and divorced after almost 50 years together and it was bitter.  It tore the family up.  The scars from that are still felt.  I was 3 and my parents just went through a bitter divorce too.  My mother, never interested in being a mom and working a job where she traveled, wasn’t around much and when she was around she was emotionally checked out.  The year was early 1983.  Our refugee status would extend for several more years.

She had an old Ford pickup with a gun rack in the window that held a rifle.  The rifle wasn’t for shooting people (necessarily) it was for shooting critters like a feral hog or snakes.  She hated snakes. And pigs (her family raised them and she says they are evil).  The drive from her house in town out to the farm would take 20-30 minutes.  She would always have the windows rolled down.  KSST would be on the radio, playing classic country music, the only kind she listened too.  In her world, it was the only music that existed.  If Paul Harvey News and Comment were on you better hush unless you wanted to get slapped.  She listened to it every day.  Another time you might get slapped is when they broadcast the trading post and she was looking for something.  No talking. 

Every trip to the farm required something to graze on, as she said.  The farm in the 80s has lost its fruit trees and the only edible thing left were wild berries in the summer that grew in the ditches by the dirt road.  I loved to pick them, careful to avoid their thorns, but they were a summer berry only.  So she would bring snacks on the visits, mostly fruit like apples and oranges and nuts and candy.  We got candy at the gas station going out to the farm.  It was a Phillips 66 for years and years.  In the 80s gasoline was either “regular” or “unleaded”.  The Ford pickup took “regular” gas.  I loved to smell the fumes of gas while filling up.  

There was a train track on the way to the farm.  It was a busy track, and many times we had to wait.  As a kid in the 80s this was pure joy, because back then the trains still had cabooses.  We would wait with anticipation until the end when the caboose came and we would wave our arms off and 9 times out of 10 the man would be back there on the caboose and he would vigorously wave back at the old woman in her Ford pickup with her blond haired little granddaughter.  The times where the caboose had no one, and we were stuck just waving at the caboose, was always a let down.  This was towards the end when they phased the caboose out all together and cuts had already been made.  Watching the trains after that held way less meaning.

Her tractor was the centerpiece of the farm.  She had hay fields, and she used it to haul hay for the cows. (And other stuff.). As a wee child she would place me on the wheel well next to her seat, and I would hang on for dear life to the round yellow reflector light.  The pastures were very bumpy, and many times it felt like the tractor was going to fall on its side it was leaning and bumping so.  I loved it.  My entire childhood was spent growing up riding on the tractor this way for hours and hours.  My cousin Laura, who was 6 months older than me, hated the tractor.  Laura was born in May, during a terrible spring Texas thunderstorm and thus she was a frightful kid “scared of her own shadow” as Me Ma would say.  One day last year, in 2016, I went to leave her nursing home and she called my name.  “Heather,” she said, “when I’d take you and Laura on the tractor as kids you’d be up there just a swinging your legs and singing and Laura would be up there just bawling her eyes out!”.  It was a random memory that had come into her old mind, and she had hung on to it, mulling it over and over again and when she told me the story she belly laughed.  I had been her little adventurous granddaughter, the one who rode the tractor for hours and climbed the mounds of hay and fed the chickens and cows.  I wasn’t scared (still aren’t) but most importantly as I’ve said before we were refugees.  Farming neighbors would see us out there and stop by, and we’d see them and stop.  And every time someone would say “I see you’ve got a partner” or “I see you’ve got a buddy” and we would both nod.  I was kinda a big deal, the era of my life when I mattered. 

In the summers the family would take fireworks out to the land to shoot them.  Other times of the year the cows would get taken to the stockyard to sell.  Except for the bull.  He implanted the heifers whose calves were sold.  As a kid for years our bull was named Seven as that was the number on his eartag.  Me Ma always called him “Ol Seven”.  He lived up into the 1990s, ripe old age for a bull, until she found him dead in the pasture one day.  One of her favorite heifers was named Bessie. The main peacock was named Pickles.  To earn a name as an animal at a farm meant something, namely that you were sticking around. A farm and the wild in general is not a place where things stick around. 

This past Christmas I was back and visiting her in the nursing home.  As a lifelong “doer” being crippled in a nursing home is terribly boring for her as there’s not much to do besides read a little, nap a little and dwell on your thoughts.  “Do you ever think of the farm?” I asked her this past Christmas.  Nobody else dares ask the tough questions but me.  She did not give a verbal answer, but nodded her head up and down very slowly.  I knew this meant yes, very much so.  After a couple of minutes she said, barely above a whisper, “I wonder if my tractor is still out there?”