The Morning Mom Finally Saw the Ocean

“She’d only waste it on that bus trip,” my brother said, and he reached past the flyer on the refrigerator for another glass of Mom’s iced tea like he had just commented on the weather.

It was the second Sunday in August. We were at Mom’s kitchen table on the home place, the same table where all three of us had eaten every Sunday dinner of our lives.

The flyer had been on her refrigerator since June, held up by a magnet shaped like an ear of corn. First Methodist Church Fall Trip. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Late September. $1,295 per person, double occupancy.

Mom had circled the price twice with a ballpoint pen. I had noticed it every Sunday since June and never said anything, because I thought that circle was her business and not mine.

Randy was talking about the CRP money. He did not have to say so. Everybody at that table knew exactly what he meant, including Mom, who set her fork down very carefully on the edge of her plate.

“I only asked if there was any of it left over this year,” she said. “I wasn’t asking for the whole thing.”

“There’s nothing left over, Mom. There never is. That’s what I keep telling you.” Randy shook his head and gave me the look a man gives another man when a woman has said something he thinks is silly. “Two thousand miles on a bus to look at water.”

“It’s about fifteen hundred,” I said.

“Fifteen hundred, two thousand. It’s a lot of money to sit in a motel and get sunburned.”

Mom picked up her napkin and folded it in half, then in half again. She did that when she was finished with a subject. She had done it my whole life.

“Randy’s right,” she said. “It’s foolish at my age. Who wants pie?”

She was 81 years old. She got up and went to the counter and cut the cherry pie into six pieces, the way she always had, even though there were only four of us at the table that day.

My dad, Don Ostrander, farmed this ground in western Kansas for fifty-one years. Wheat, mostly, and some milo, and a few years of sunflowers he always regretted. The home place is eleven miles south of town on a gravel road.

About twenty years before he died, Dad put 160 acres of his poorest ground into the Conservation Reserve Program. That is the government program where you plant a field back to grass and leave it alone, and the government pays you a yearly rent for doing it.

Out where we live, the rent on that kind of ground runs about $45 an acre. On 160 acres that comes to $7,200 a year. It comes once a year, in October, from the Farm Service Agency.

For Mom and Dad, that October money was the cushion. It paid the property taxes and the insurance on the house and Dad’s pickup, and whatever was left over went in a coffee can in the pantry that Dad called the ocean fund.

He called it that because of a promise. For their twenty-fifth anniversary, Dad had promised Mom he would take her to see the ocean. She had grown up in Kansas and married in Kansas and had never been farther east than Kansas City.

That was the summer the hail came. It came in June, two weeks before harvest, and it took most of the wheat in about eleven minutes. The anniversary trip turned into a new combine payment, and Mom said she understood.