My Uncle Doug who died in 2013 willed me 13 acres of the family’s land in Alabama. My mother has a 9-acre triangle, the two separated by another family member’s. Upon Uncle Doug’s parcel was my grandma’s house where I stayed a couple summers as a child. The last time I was at the property was 1986 and the house was still there, but a few year’s later Uncle Doug sold it and it was relocated to town.
Every now and then I check the available views of the thickly-wooded acreage (the one above is of the northwest corner and the one below a bird’s eye of roughly all of it), and I wax more than a little bit wistfully as to what the rest of my life might be like if I cleared out a patch nearest the creek that runs through it and farthest from its boundaries big enough to drop a double-wide and a chicken coop and grow some vegetables.
I’d have dogs and a shotgun and an old truck all inside a surrounding fence amply posted with invitations to keep the heck out, and within which I would wander the trees, naming the older ones, and just live.
I’d be a stranger for sure and from all angles: socially, religiously, politically. But at least that corner of that strange land would be mine.