Plants of ornamental grass arrogance.
Every once in a while, I walk to where the water used to be. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know. That’s the weird thing. A two-acre lake can disappear so completely that a stranger only sees pastures. The hie rba is thick now. Spring clears. The old stone fence follows the ridge, quiet and motionless, doing what it has done for more than a century: marking the place where one responsibility ends and another begins.
Sometimes I support my boot on the stones like my grandfather did.
I think more about him as I get older. I think about the way his hands looked, broke and healed, always carrying some small injuries from the work he considered too common to mention. I think of how I would have reacted if I had come down that ridge and seen water where his grass belonged. I wouldn’t have screamed first. He would have kept quiet. Then he would have measured. Then he would have acted.
