The Farm My Daughter Called Worthless

“Mom’s always been happiest with dirt under her nails. Guess Daddy knew exactly what to give her.”

Elvira said it across the lawyer’s conference table with a smile stretched so wide it barely fit her face, and nobody in that room laughed, but nobody told her to stop either. Seven days after we buried my husband, that was the sound of my daughter inheriting the house on Maple, the house Dorris and I raised her in, while I got handed a rusted iron key to a forty acre farm outside Clarksburg that the family had spent thirty years calling Dorris’s dead end hobby.

I want to tell you about my husband before I tell you about that key, because you won’t understand what came next otherwise.

Dorris Cottrell fixed things. That was the whole of him, if you had to boil a man down to one sentence. He fixed tractors for half the county for thirty years out of a shop behind the feed store, and he fixed our marriage more times than either of us liked to admit, and every Sunday afternoon for as long as I could remember, he drove out to that farm outside Clarksburg alone and came back smelling like diesel and cut hay, calmer than he’d been all week. I used to tease him about it. I called it his church. He never argued with that.

I taught third grade for thirty one years in the same brick building two blocks from Maple Street. I liked chalk on my hands and a room full of loud children and the particular quiet of a classroom after the last bus pulled away. Dorris liked engines and open land and things he could take apart and understand completely. We were different that way our whole lives, and it worked, the way two people can hold very different rooms in the same house and still call it one home.