The Eye For It
Our dad was the one who taught me to see a street.
He farmed the ground Dale farms now. Every October he would take a day he did not have and tie cornstalk bundles to the fence posts clear up our lane.
He stood sunflowers in the mouth of the mailbox and set pumpkins on the steps in a line that went big to little.
Mom said it was a waste of a working day. He did it anyway, every year.
He said a place ought to look like somebody loved it when the weather turned mean.
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Rochelle was four years older, and she kept his feed records and his seed-corn tallies in a composition book because she liked a column that added up.
I was the one who rode the fence with him in the cold and held the twine. He would step back and squint and say move that one up a hand, Patty.
And I would, and he was always right, and I learned to see what he saw. Where a street sagged and where it needed a little lift. Where to put the tall thing so your eye climbed.
When he passed, the spring I turned thirty, we split what there was the way families do.
Rochelle took the house in town he had bought for Mom. I took the garden and his old flatbed trailer and the field the sunflowers reseed themselves in every year without my help.
She got the books. I got the eye.
Neither of us ever called it that, but that is what it was.
The committee asked me the first fall after, when the square looked tired and somebody remembered I was Hank’s girl.
I did the east-side lampposts that year with cornstalks off our own field and sunflowers I had let go to seed.
A woman I did not know stopped me and said it looked like her childhood. I went home and cried in the truck, because it was the thing my father used to do, and now I was the one doing it.
Nine years. Rochelle took the committee seat two years in and started doing the map, and it made sense, she is good at a list.