(CREATIVE NONFICTION)
NO MORE, NO LESS
KAY PORTERFIELD
NO MORE, NO LESS
KAY PORTERFIELD
Year by year, my father teaches me my place. As I walk with him over our fields, newly worked soil sifts into my shoes and stockings. He teaches me in threes like the old ones, showing me how to tell loam, clay and muck apart by look and feel and smell. He names the rocks that glaciers scoured from Canada and carried to our farm: granite, limestone, and gneiss, the fieldstones that rise with the thaw each spring. Watching the plowing, the planting, the reaping, I wait for the furrowing under when stalks and stubble return to earth. We will all be fertilizer someday, my father tells me. No more. No less. You’ll nourish something else, and when that dies, the two of you fertilize another thing, and on it goes. There is an end to everything, and nothing ever ends. It changes form.
I study the clouds my father calls cumulous, cirrus, and stratus. He takes me walking in our woodlot, pointing out violets, trillium, and lady’s slippers. He names the trees: hickory, oak, and maple. We study the tracks of deer, raccoon, and opossum. We listen to the calls of the red winged blackbirds, killdeer, and mourning doves. “Never forget these things,” he says. “No one can steal your memories from you.” By repetition, I weave the names he gives me into memory.
***
After the flatbed truck rolls down our driveway, two men lumber around back, and pull metal ramps from beneath the bed. The grizzled one climbs onto a yellow Caterpillar tractor. He starts the engine and eases the dozer’s metal tracks down the clattering ramps.
Each day the growling machine uproots our trees, wrenching and snapping them like broken bones until wooden corpses litter the landscape, their scarred bark weeping sap. The machine snarls and scrapes our land so my father can grow 20 more acres of soybeans. Nobody needs a woodlot anymore, he says. The trees are too twisted to harvest for lumber. The heartwood is rotting in some. Uprooting them will send me to college.
After the driver parks the Cat and rumbles away for the night in his rusty pickup, I slip away to what is left of our woods. Alone and fourteen in my old sweater the color of apples, I sit on a fallen trunk encircled by smashed trees. Their exposed roots are clenched fists filled with soil. Amid the withering leaves and acrid smell of greenwood sap, I mourn this sacrifice I do not want.
***
From the distance of years I watch the girl in the red sweater with sleeves too short for her growing arms. She doesn’t imagine that, a year after her father has burned the last dead tree to ash, he will regret the ruin he has caused. Or that he will give up farming and put the place up for sale when she is in college. Nobody needs a small farmer anymore, he will say. We’ve outlived our purpose.
I wish I could tell the girl, rocking back and forth, keening in the graveyard of trees, that in forty years her father will weaken so in body and in mind that before he dies, he won’t remember he ever owned a woods, let alone destroyed one.
She needs to understand that one day, she will be the last one of her family alive to remember the farm with the hickory nuts, the fragrant violets and the rich dark loam. The doe and the spotted fawn standing by the woodlot at dusk. I want to put my arms around her and thank her for reciting those charms against forgetting. It might console her to know they have worked.
I study the clouds my father calls cumulous, cirrus, and stratus. He takes me walking in our woodlot, pointing out violets, trillium, and lady’s slippers. He names the trees: hickory, oak, and maple. We study the tracks of deer, raccoon, and opossum. We listen to the calls of the red winged blackbirds, killdeer, and mourning doves. “Never forget these things,” he says. “No one can steal your memories from you.” By repetition, I weave the names he gives me into memory.
***
After the flatbed truck rolls down our driveway, two men lumber around back, and pull metal ramps from beneath the bed. The grizzled one climbs onto a yellow Caterpillar tractor. He starts the engine and eases the dozer’s metal tracks down the clattering ramps.
Each day the growling machine uproots our trees, wrenching and snapping them like broken bones until wooden corpses litter the landscape, their scarred bark weeping sap. The machine snarls and scrapes our land so my father can grow 20 more acres of soybeans. Nobody needs a woodlot anymore, he says. The trees are too twisted to harvest for lumber. The heartwood is rotting in some. Uprooting them will send me to college.
After the driver parks the Cat and rumbles away for the night in his rusty pickup, I slip away to what is left of our woods. Alone and fourteen in my old sweater the color of apples, I sit on a fallen trunk encircled by smashed trees. Their exposed roots are clenched fists filled with soil. Amid the withering leaves and acrid smell of greenwood sap, I mourn this sacrifice I do not want.
***
From the distance of years I watch the girl in the red sweater with sleeves too short for her growing arms. She doesn’t imagine that, a year after her father has burned the last dead tree to ash, he will regret the ruin he has caused. Or that he will give up farming and put the place up for sale when she is in college. Nobody needs a small farmer anymore, he will say. We’ve outlived our purpose.
I wish I could tell the girl, rocking back and forth, keening in the graveyard of trees, that in forty years her father will weaken so in body and in mind that before he dies, he won’t remember he ever owned a woods, let alone destroyed one.
She needs to understand that one day, she will be the last one of her family alive to remember the farm with the hickory nuts, the fragrant violets and the rich dark loam. The doe and the spotted fawn standing by the woodlot at dusk. I want to put my arms around her and thank her for reciting those charms against forgetting. It might console her to know they have worked.
Kay Marie Porterfield’s essays have been published in Hippocampus and several times in The Sun. One was anthologized in Selected Memories: Five Years of Hippocampus Magazine. Another was included in the anthology, Crazy Woman Creek. She was raised in Michigan on a farm. Currently she lives and writes near Denver, Colorado.