He was not a sentimental man in the way people use that word. He didn’t give speeches at dinner or talk about feelings unless someone was dying. But I thought the earth was a covenant. Not owned in the way a bank views the property. Not an asset line or an investment vehicle. The earth, for him, was the memory under your feet and the responsibility on your head. He taught me to repair the fence before he taught me how to drive. He taught me to read shadows of clouds moving over a grass, how to say what pines they needed thinning, how to recognize when a stream was muddy because someone upstream had done something stupid.
And he taught me about boundaries.
The old stacked stone fence marked our southern line. He ran along the ridge in a crooked and stubborn manner, following the earth instead of fighting it. No one alive knew exactly who built it. County records referred to “stone boundary markers” since 1871. The fence was older than my grandfather, older than my father, older than every argument that would ever happen around him. Some stretches had fallen slightly over the years, but the line was unmistakable, hand-placed stones rising from the ridge like a spine.
