The Two Acres Grandma Sold Us

Two thousand a year to live in a house that might still have water in the basement every wet spring.

I wrote the number on the back of an envelope and stared at it until it did not look like a number anymore.

That Sunday, after church, I drove out to my grandmother’s. I did not plan to ask her for anything.

I just wanted to sit in a kitchen where nobody had ever told me to go live in a flood.

My grandmother is Marlys Olson. She is eighty-four years old, and she still lives on the farmstead her daddy built in 1936, eight miles northwest of town, across the section road from Gene’s forty.

She rents her farm ground to a neighbor now. She kept the house, the barn, the windbreak, the garden, and about six acres of yard and pasture around it, which is what she calls “the part a widow can still mow.”

She was at the counter rolling out pie crust when I came in. She did not ask me what was wrong.

She looked at my face, wiped her hands on her apron, and put the coffee on.

I told her everything. The lease, the forty, the bottom, the bank, the two thousand a year. She listened with her hands folded on the oilcloth, the way she listens to the sermon, without moving.

When I finished she was quiet for a long time.

The clock over her stove is the same clock that was there when I was a little girl, and I listened to it tick while she thought.

“How much ground does a house need?” she said finally.

“Grandma, no,” I said. I knew right away where she was going, and I did not want it. I had not driven out there to take anything from her.

“I didn’t ask what you want,” she said. “I asked how much ground a house needs. A house and a yard and a garden and a place for a swing someday. How much?”

“Two acres would do it,” I said. “Maybe less. But Grandma, this is your place. This is Great-Grandpa’s place.”

“East of the windbreak,” she said, like I had not spoken. “Between the cedars and the road. It’s high. It’s never had water on it in my lifetime, and my lifetime is long.”

I knew the spot. It was a strip of pasture where she used to keep a few bucket calves when Grandpa was alive.

It sat right up along the section road, and it looked straight across at Gene’s forty.

“Grandma,” I said, “we’d be looking right at his solar panels. Every single day. Out the kitchen window.”

She picked up her rolling pin again. “Then he can look back at you,” she said.

I laughed in spite of myself, and then I cried a little, and she let me, and she kept rolling crust. That is how my grandmother has handled every hard thing in my life.

Cody came out with me the next Sunday. He walked that strip of pasture with his hands in his jacket pockets, kicking at the old grass, looking at the ground the way a farmer looks at ground.