A Bushel's Worth. Kayann Short

A Trace of Rural Roots

      In the rural economy of my childhood, everything had measure. After each meal at my grandparents’ farm, plates were scraped into a pail and the remnants topped with milk. Once the dishes were done, my grandmother and I walked to the barnyard to empty the pail into a bowl outside the barn door for the mother cat and the kittens she hid in the hay. Half-wild, they wouldn’t come out to eat until we returned to the farmhouse. Sometimes, glancing back, I’d catch a shimmer of quick cat fur as they darted under the door for their food. In this rural ritual, nothing—not the scraps left over from the table, not the steps to the barnyard and back—is wasted. Preserved even now by memory’s spare prose, in that crossing a trace of happiness remains.

      What do you take from a place you love and what do you leave behind? I was born in North Dakota, but my family left for Colorado when I was four. Every summer throughout my childhood, we would “go home” for our vacation to visit my two sets of grandparents on their farms. As soon as school was out each June, my family would make the long day’s drive back in our station wagon, leaving before sunrise and stopping only for gas or a quick picnic lunch in a wind-blown park in Wyoming or South Dakota.

      We were anxious to reach the Smith farm by early evening, where our cousins and aunts and uncles waited in the farm kitchen with our grandparents, watching out the big window facing the highway to see our dusty car turn down the gravel drive. After hugs and kisses in the farmyard, the adults went inside to ready our meal while Grandma led the children to the robin’s nest hidden in the long grass near the house, its blue eggs mirroring the sky against the yellow prairie. We looked for that nest each year, a sign that we, like the robin, had returned.

      After my grandmother’s good supper, my sisters and brother and I would sit at the kitchen table long past our bedtime eating homemade toast with butter from my uncle’s creamery or a late night bowl of sugary cereal, the kind we never had at home. As we watched the northern sunlight darken slowly over the prairie, we listened to the adults share last year’s news until they noticed our dawdling and sent us to bed, even though the sun hadn’t fully set. That far north, the twilight lingers much longer over the prairie than it does in the Colorado mountains. As the oldest, I was cross about going to bed while the sky was still light, so I watched the sun slowly disappear through the window of my grandmother’s bedroom until it dropped behind the horizon and I dropped off to sleep. The farms meant robins’ nests and long grass and the hot sun that didn’t set until almost midnight, and I could hardly wait for school

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