Every year in late autumn, the sky lost its summer softness;
The air turned cold and crisp; the leaves formed a vegetal carpet underfoot
As my father and I walked the boundaries of the land.
I explored the small house on the hill inhabited by some unknown number of greats grandmother
Where she chose to be alone for reasons never explained
And found her old cream crockery milking jug still in its place by the door.
I clambered into the loft of the log barn to find that the builder,
Another unknown number of greats grandfather, had stored his axe beneath the eaves.
I left it there with its rusted blade and yet sturdy wooden handle,
Too heavy for my seven year old self to safely carry.
Though I loved the stories that lived there, I knew that they were not mine;
That they were not all; that many other stories could be told.
I felt no difference when I stepped through the rusted barbed wire fence
Separating our fields from the neighbors,
And when I followed one of the several small creeks through multiple farms,
The water that flowed remained the same, only sometimes with cows on the banks.
We no longer lived there, never had since before my birth, and I wondered what made it ours.
A piece of paper seemed a made-up thing, as imaginary as the boundary lines,
As unreal as the notion that land could be owned.
Might as well say we also possessed the light above, the hoots of the owls at night,
And the wind that sometimes rattled the old windmill generator.
Purely silly, I thought, and another thing in the world I would never understand.
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