The Trip My Son Would Not Cancel

We sat at the kitchen table. Two coffee cups. I poured his and I poured mine and I sat down across from my son in the chairs Marion picked out in 1981.

And after not very long, he got to it.

He was gentle about it, in that reasonable voice. He said he knew it was early and he was sorry to bring it up, but Sloane had thought it was better to have the conversation in person than let it drag, and he wanted to understand where things stood with the estate. The farm. The land. He talked about the land the way a man talks about a stock he owns. He said he assumed we would sell, that neither of us was getting any younger, that the acreage out here was worth a real number now with the way ground had gone, and that of course he understood Colleen had been doing a lot lately and should be compensated for her time, and he wanted to make sure the split was fair to everybody.

Fair to everybody.

I let him finish. I have learned in seventy-four years that you let a man finish, because he tells you the truth about himself in the finishing. And when he was done I drank some of my coffee, and I looked out the window at the maple, and I told my son the truth.

I told him that four years ago, in 2022, before his mother ever got sick, before any of this, Marion and I sat down with Harlan Petrie, who has been our lawyer in town since Ford was president, and we made our decisions. I told him it was not a hard conversation and it was not an angry one. We were not angry then. We were just clear-eyed. We looked at our two children and we asked each other a simple question, the question I think every parent is afraid to ask honestly. Who is this land for.

The land is a living thing. It is not a number. It is a hundred and eighty acres that my grandfather broke and my father worked and I worked, and it feeds people, and it holds the woodlot Marion’s grandfather would not cut, and it holds her now, back of Trinity, and it will hold me. A farm is not an inheritance you cash out. It is a trust you hand to the person who will keep it. And the only one of our children who ever loved this ground, who ever put her hands in it, who stayed, who built her life two miles down the road so her babies could run in these fields, was Colleen.