The Candle That Cost The Farm

The Farm Outside Sioux Falls

I married into land before I married into a family. That’s how it felt the first time Ken drove me out to see the place, twenty minutes past the edge of Sioux Falls on a gravel road that turned to dust behind us in July. Two hundred acres of corn and soybeans, a red barn that had been re-roofed twice, and a white farmhouse with a porch that wrapped around two sides of it like it was hugging itself against the wind.

“My dad built the addition on the east side,” Ken told me that day, standing in the yard with his hands in his pockets. “Mom still keeps his boots by the mudroom door.”

I should have understood then what that farm meant to this family. I did understand it, actually. I just didn’t understand yet what it would cost me.

I came into Ken’s life already a mother. My daughter, Charlotte, was two years old when I met him, and her father, Will, had been gone for six months by then. Will died in a grain bin accident on his uncle’s place outside Worthington, Minnesota, the kind of death that gets talked about in low voices at the co-op and then never mentioned again. I don’t say much about it because there isn’t much good to say. He went to work on a Tuesday and he didn’t come home, and Charlotte will never remember him except through photographs and the stories I choose to tell her.

Ken didn’t flinch from any of that. He proposed to me in the front seat of his truck outside a Runza in Sioux Falls, no ring box, no speech, just “I want to be there for both of you, if you’ll let me,” and I cried into a paper sack of onion rings and said yes. He adopted Charlotte legally two years later, the same summer we got married in the yard of that same farmhouse, under a tent his father, Chris, had rented from the VFW hall in Hartford.

Evelyn hosted the reception. She smiled in every photograph. It took me almost three years to understand that a woman can smile in every photograph and still never once say your daughter’s name at the dinner table.