My grandfather bought this land seventy years ago, when the nearest paved road was three miles east and the only neighbors were other dairy farmers who understood that the smell of a working farm was just the smell of honest living. He paid cash for sixty acres of rolling pasture, a timber-frame barn that needed a new roof, and a ridgeline view that he said on clear mornings looked like someone had painted it specifically to remind you that the world was worth getting up for. He ran cattle on it for thirty years.
My father ran it after him, converted to row crops and hay, kept one corner of the lower pasture as kitchen garden until my mother passed and the garden went to clover. I took it over at thirty-two when my father’s knees gave out, and I have been here since, doing what farmers do, which is work until dark and wake up before light and try not to let the land get ahead of you. The crown of the whole property is the oak tree on the eastern ridge.
Two hundred years old, give or take a decade. The trunk is wider than my arm span and then some. The canopy spreads forty feet in every direction, and in summer it puts out a shade so deep and complete that the ground beneath it stays damp on the hottest days of July.
My grandfather used to say that tree was there before the county was a county, before the state was a state, before most of the families in the region had a great-great-grandmother to remember. He was not a sentimental man, my grandfather, but he talked about that tree with something close to reverence. The ridge it sits on backs right up to the eastern property line.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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