Part 1: The Woman Holding Number 47
The Auction
My father-in-law sold the family farm for $286,000 to a hunter from Denver because his son had married a girl from town. Four years later, I returned to that very farmyard for an auction, holding bidder card number 47.
The elderly farmer in my dental chair waited until I moved the suction tube away.
“Your father-in-law’s been talking at the co-op coffee table,” he said.
“Walt says his boy married a town girl.”
“Says she’d have that place chopped into lots by Christmas.”
I placed my scaler on the instrument tray.
I’d grown up in Kearney. That much was true.
My husband, Luke, had been raised on that farm.
A white farmhouse. A red barn. Eighty acres of pasture, eleven miles outside town.
His mother, June, passed away that January.
By February, Walt announced he intended to sell.
We sat across from him at the kitchen table and asked whether we could purchase it through a contract.
We would make payments straight to him, the same arrangement his father had once used.
“I’ll think on it,” he said.
But in April, he sold the property to a Denver man interested in pheasant hunting.
Luke learned about the sale through a two-minute call while working at the county shop.
When I repeated what the farmer had heard at the co-op, Luke remained standing at our kitchen counter for a long while.
“Ames, he just buried Mom. I’m not going to fight him over a sentence.”
He had a point.
So I chose not to argue either.
We spent Easter at Luke’s sister’s home in Gibbon.
Fourteen family members. Ham, scalloped potatoes, and June’s glass plate for deviled eggs.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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