The Acre Under the Cottonwood

The rule on the home place

The home place sits four miles south of town on a gravel road, along Bow Creek. It was Marlys’s father’s farm first.

Walt Pearson bought the ground in 1951 with money he saved hauling grain, and he farmed it until he could not climb onto a tractor.

Everybody calls it the Lindgren place now, because Marlys and her husband Arlen moved onto it when Walt got old.

Arlen has been gone nine years. Marlys still lives in the white farmhouse with the green trim, and she still mows her own yard.

The acre tradition started with Grandpa Walt, and it started because of something that hurt him. I only learned the whole story later, but I will tell it here so you understand her.

When Marlys and her sister Lorraine got married, Walt gave Lorraine’s husband an acre along the creek as a wedding gift, to tie them back to the place, since Lorraine was moving to town and Marlys was staying on the farm.

In 1988, Lorraine’s husband Dale sold his acre to a man from Sioux City who wanted a place to park a camper and hunt deer.

The man put up a pole shed and a sign that said No Hunting, and Walt could see that sign from his kitchen window every day for the rest of his life.

After that, Walt made his rule. The land would go only to blood, to grandchildren, on their sixteenth birthday, one acre each, in a row along the creek.

“So there will always be family on that ground,” he used to say. Marlys says it the same way, word for word, with the same little nod at the end.

Kenny was the first one. He turned sixteen in the year 2000, and Walt had the abstract office draw up the deed and drove him out to the creek himself.

Kenny picked the acre with the big cottonwood on it, the biggest tree on the place.

Walt died three years later. Lorraine had taken her share in cash long before, and moved to Omaha, so the home place came to Marlys.

Her niece Lisa got the second acre the next spring. Then Marlys kept the rule going for her own grandchildren, the way she had promised her father she would.

Kenny’s brother Mike has three kids. His sister Jan has two. Every one of them got their acre on their sixteenth birthday.

That made seven acres staked along the creek, each one with a cedar corner post and a little aluminum tag with a name on it.