[sense of place]
He sits at the kitchen table as I fill up his coffee cup, his overshoes dripping mud on the linoleum floor, wool cap pushed up off of his ears, his neckerchief loosened. It’s a beautiful morning in western North Dakota, and my father has been outside moving hay bales from the fields to the barn in a tractor that has been used for the same type of work year after year for as long as I can remember. We talk about the weather as he stands up and looks out the kitchen window that faces the red barn and the corrals below the house. I imagine him having done this a million times before as a young man growing up in this house.
My father returned with that education, first in the early 1980s when he was twenty-seven with a wife and two children, when his father was still alive. He bought some land down the road and put in a house, took a construction job and helped his father run cattle. But it wasn’t enough. A lump hits his throat each time he talks about the day he had to pack us up and move to eastern North Dakota where there was a living waiting for my mother and him.
But he’s a guest in this house now, having moved away from the 3,000 acres of ranchland on the edge of the Badlands in North Dakota when he was eighteen to grab that education his father made him vow to get. An education that would help ensure there were other ways to make a living besides ranching.
The Chance to STAY HOME By Jessie Veeder Scofield
16
