“Did you forget your barn boots?”
He asks me this as we head outside to gather eggs for breakfast. The yard is muddy, and the dogs, easily excited, streaked my clothes with mud yesterday upon my arrival.
I did forget them, I admit. I show up with nothing but sandals, their lines tanned onto my feet like brands because that is all I have worn in weeks. This is a place I know well, a place I love for its grassy pastures, unpaved roads and dairy barns crowded with mewling calves. I haven’t visited in some time, and now I come without the proper attire — how foolish of me. I should know better, and no doubt my little red-headed friend is thinking the same.
We take the eggs, and it feels like thievery as the hens squawk their displeasure. This chicken coop was just being built when I was 19 and a student. “You can live in it,” they had joked, but I was serious. I do want to live here, I thought. I could have lived happily in a chicken coop with a frying pan, a bedroll, and a guitar. Maybe a bar of soap to last me a little while.
The boys, faces lit with glee, insist that we drive up to the pasture on the hill. Do I remember the day I took them up there to play? Yes, I tell them, I remember. Evidently I do not remember as vividly as they do. In the fencerow, they tell me, are the remains of a fort we made. That was almost seven years ago.
We trudge through the wet field and duck through scrub and brush until we think we have found the place. Is this pile of sticks our living room? Yes, they say, sure of themselves. It was right here. The branches have grown thicker and the floor is bumpy with roots poking through the moss. But somehow, to them, still recognizable.
It has been a long time since I spent an afternoon stacking rocks into walls. It is not as common, not for me, not now, not yet. I walk on sidewalks and take the elevator to the 31st floor, where the view is not one of pastures and ponds but of streets and high-rises, all in grids of dingy gray. I come home and walk barefoot to the mailbox. I tend my garden wearing a dress and cook a supper for two, and the kitchen is clean by bedtime. It is a tidy life, and I rarely need my barn boots.
Everything is not so tidy as it seems, of course. I shake hands with lawyers and judges, saying whatever politeness requires. I hear words I wish I could erase and stories of people I cannot help. I remember that but for His grace, there I would go, too. There is far more mud and filth to wade through in this world of clean hands and shiny shoes than I ever imagined when I was a student, feeding calves and wondering if the future would be less dirty. It is far dirtier.
Do I still need these boots, crusted with dirt, bent and worn, smelling of the barn? Yes, I still need them. It is good of you to remind me.
The boys are grown up into little men now. They hunt, trap, tend their animals, do their chores, love their little siblings. Sometimes barefoot, sometimes in barn boots — whatever the occasion requires.
Rediscovering the ancient ruins of a once-grand fort is not as exciting as driving around a field of round bales in an old army Jeep, and thus we move to our next activity. They whoop and cheer as I make muddy tracks where hay was just cut. I am cut loose, free as a gull, hoping I am not doing something wrong, and knowing I am not like this anywhere but here. Knowing, now that I am here, that I am still me.