The Two Acres Grandma Sold Us

“My mother came down from Nebraska in 1941 to marry my daddy,” she said. “She brought one suitcase, her mother’s quilt, and a lilac sucker in a coffee can. She watered it on the train with her drinking water.”

“She planted it the week they moved in here,” Grandma said. “Daddy said it would never live through a Kansas August. She said it would live if somebody loved it. It’s been blooming for eighty-five years.”

She cut the shoot loose with a little ball of root and dirt, and I held a five-gallon bucket while she set it in.

Her hands were shaking. Not from age, I think. Or not only from age.

We walked it over together, the two of us carrying the bucket between us across the pasture and through the gap in the windbreak, the way you would carry something that might spill.

She wanted it by the back door. Not the front. “The front door is for company,” she said. “The back door is for family. That’s the one you’ll use every day. That’s where it goes.”

Cody dug the hole while she watched him and told him it was not deep enough twice.

Then Grandma got down on her knees, which took a while, and set the lilac in with her own bare hands and pressed the dirt down around it.

She stayed down there a minute, with her palms flat on the dirt, not moving. I thought she was catching her breath.

Then I saw her lips moving, and I realized she was praying, and I knelt down beside her and put my hand on her back.

“Now it’s home,” she said, when she was done. She let Cody help her up.

She brushed the dirt off her knees and looked at the little stick of a lilac by my back door, and then she looked at me.

“Your great-grandmother would like you,” she said. “She liked women who did not make a fuss and did not back down. She would say you are a good deal like her.”

I could not say anything. I just held onto her.

She smelled like pie crust and cedar and cold cream, the way she always has, and I stood there in my own backyard and cried into her shoulder.

We moved in the first week of October. The kitchen was the last room finished, and it was the room I had wanted my whole life: a long table that Cody built out of boards from Grandma’s old corn crib, and a big window.

The big window faced east. That was the one thing about our house plans we had to change.

On Gene’s forty, it would have faced the road to the south. On Grandma’s two acres, the road and the view and the morning sun were all to the east.

And to the east, across the section road, sat forty acres of solar panels. There was no other way to put the window.

There was no hiding from it. If you sat at my kitchen table, you saw those panels.

I thought about that a lot in the days after we moved in.

I thought about whether a decent person would invite a man to sit at a table that looked straight out at the thing he did to you.