The Town Girl Who Bought the Farm Back

The Ditch, the Mailbox, the Lilacs

The first summer, I found Grant Ostrander’s Denver address on the county tax records and wrote him a letter. I kept it short. I said my husband grew up on the place and his mother had planted the lilacs by the porch, and I asked if I could keep them watered.

He called me a week later. He was polite, and a little puzzled. “Sure,” he said. “Water whatever you want. I’m only out there in November.”

So once a month, from May to September, we drove out on a Sunday afternoon with the kids and two five-gallon buckets and a hose we hooked to the hydrant by the barn.

Luke mowed the road ditch along the front of the yard, from the mailbox to the culvert at the end of the drive. The county mowed the rest of the road twice a year, but the stretch by the house was June’s. She had always kept it nice.

The second winter, a county plow clipped the mailbox post and laid it in the snow. It was not Luke’s truck, but it was Luke’s department. He went out on his own time with a post-hole digger and a bag of concrete and set a new one, plumb and solid.

We never went inside. We never went in the barn. We watered the lilacs, mowed the ditch, picked up the shingles the wind took off the machine shed, and went home.

Walt went to every one of Cody’s ball games in those four years. He sat in the top row of the bleachers in his seed cap and clapped when Cody got a hit. He came to Hailey’s band concerts. He came for Thanksgiving and Christmas and birthdays.

He was polite to me. I was polite to him. Neither one of us said one word about the farm, not once in four years. It sat between us at every meal like a dish nobody would pass.