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(Forgive me... so far behind in responding to your kind notes... and sinus cold and achy bones lingering here... I humbly thank you for your grace... His grace in you... You are each loved, appreciated. Thank you... All's grace, Ann)

The land, all this land criss-crossed by gravel roads, roars with combines rounding up pods of gold nuggets, tractors hauling wagons peaked with autumn’s currency.

Photo: combining beans in my mama's fields

I come with suppers for work-worn men. And find our Ford tractor slumbering in fall’s honeyed-light. Cocking head, I try to figure this, why the Ford’s idle when all tractors work.

Farmer Husband sees me, there on gravel lane with dinner plates in hand, puzzling. Half smiling, slight roll of the eyes, he hollers over the rumble of tractor engines, “Lost the keys.”

That explains it, the Ford tractor sitting out.

No keys.

Photo: Farmer Husband driving the 1466

So instead of the Ford tractor in its usual place, running the auger, the 1466’s doing double duty. She’s hauling wagons to the grain bins, where Farmer Husband then unhitches the 1466 from the wagon, hooks it onto the auger, unloads that load of beans, then unhooks from auger, hitches back up to the wagon, then roars back to the field for another load of harvested soybeans. Complicated, tiring dance.

But without keys...

Photo: Farmer Husband checking a handful of soybeans

“You wouldn’t mind going to get another set of keys for the Ford, would you?” He asks me between mouthfuls. He grins that boy-smile of his, winks for good measure.

I laugh, besotted. That smile still makes me flutter.

“For you, anything.”

He chuckles, winks again, and our happiness mingles.

“I already called over to McGavin’s and explained.”

I glance down at the apron I’m still wearing and he reads my mind.

“You don’t have to go in. They said they’d leave the keys in a bag out front, and just bill us… I’ll watch the kids.”

Kids and laughter have spilled out of van, taken off across an already harvested swath of field in a game of tag, wandered off into the ditches looking for frogs, wildflowers, last of warm-day adventures.

“Take the pick-up, if you want.”

The auger’s rattling empty, sign that the wagon’s empty, and we both nod, knowing he’s got to fly, and he hands me his plate, touches my forehead with a kiss and we linger for a moment, and then he’s gone to unhitch and hitch up and head back, and I take plate back to pick-up truck and leave harvest’s dance in search of keys.

In search of keys.

A drive through the country looking for who we are.

The children wave to me from the field, their shadow’s long, their faces golden too. I wave to this mingling of our happiness.

The truck’s shadow slips along field’s grassy fringe. Children run across endless field stretching and into light deepening, and I remember. In light like this, in a field where our own dad drove tractor, my brother and I too ran across wide open forever fields, sure we’d touch the sun coming close. We were once young too.

I pass the old Gower Farm, the Crawford Place, stop at the intersection where the Moncrieff General Store once hustled with brisk business. Past the corner, Duncan McKay’s place is really fading, everything growing in, up, over. These are well-traveled roads. I wouldn’t have yet been four, taking these sideroads to McGavin’s Farm Equipment with my Dad, him in need of a part for this tractor, a belt for that piece of machinery.

By the time I get down to the County Line, I’ve passed half a dozen fields kicking up harvest dust. I don’t know all the names of these farmers, their stories, but living off the land, we all live this rhythm. This sky-land-God harmony.

Photo: combines loading waiting trucks down on the County Line

It’s a song that makes me long for my Dad. Where does this fall day find him? Somewhere out on this land, behind a steering wheel too?

In the little hamlet of Walton, I pull past the Inn, the peeling clapboard of the Community Center, the red brick house on which you can still read Newcombe’s Pianos painted onto the brick. Then into McGavin’s, where the old school house with its bell in the tower still stands, a building now full of farm equipment parts. I can remember how my four-year-old feet made those wood floorboards creak, how the place smelled of grease.

Next to the front door, there’s a paperbag held down by a stone; stapled to the bag, a bill with our name typed across the top.

Key’s in here. I’ve found our name.

I’m headed back to fields, going the long way around. In the back of my head, heart, I know what I'm looking for. It's been too long since I came this way. Up by the cemetery where we buried my sister in a bitter November wind, that same year I was four.

I pull into the lane under the spruce tree, idle the truck for a moment, and look for her flat stone, the one that reads only those five letters on a wee tablet of granite: Aimee.

I need to run my fingers across her letters, know that she was.

I find names I’ve known my whole life, “Wheeler” and “Finch” and “Kerr” and “Oldfield,” family names that knew these parts long before we wandered here, but I can’t find her, those five etched letters laying over dirt, over a child’s coffin. My foot finds an indentation, a little hollow. Is this her here?

I kneel, pull back a handful of grass, yank at a clump of weeds. I dig my nails into earth. Dirt’s moist and dark under my nails, but I can’t find her, that slab of stone marking her place. I press the palm of my hand down onto cemetery carpet, sweep along the grass, a bit wild, desperate.

Is this how it goes? Dust returns to dust, and we are known no more? Grass blades scratch hand and something aches inside, burns.

I’ll stop at Dad’s on the way back to our fields, tell him Aimee’s stone needs to be found, dug up from time’s soiled blanket.

I take the 12th concession, the one I took every morning from kindergarten until grade 13, the bus route through Cranbrook, past that empty field where us farm kids used to play baseball on thick August evenings. The fields a tangle of weeds and the trees are leafier, the shadows darker.

At Emmeline Steiss’ I can still see the bent woman with her dozens of cats lapping milk from old pie plates lining her stone walk’s dappled light. Emmeline’s long gone. All that remains today is a waiting pyre, her home, barn, bulldozed into this pile overgrown with serpentine vines. Such a mangled mess of her memories would singe her. Blisters me too… Can we go back, take roads home again?

I stop at the old home farm, stick my head in the front porch screen door, ask after Dad.

“He’s working on Wayne Henry’s farm,” Dad’s wife calls from the kitchen and the chicken she’s cooking up.

Wayne Henry’s farm? Does she mean what we always called the Bremner Place? Dad bought that farm from Mr. and Mrs. Bremner and their nine kids thirty years ago. Years later, Wayne Henry bought the house on the corner of the farm. Names fade and stories change and what was, now isn’t.

The auger of the Gleaner combine’s unloading beans into a string of wagons, when I pull into the Bremner Place, Dad behind the combine wheel. He flings open the door for me, and I climb in beside him.

“No kids?” It’s good to hear Dad’s voice, sit in this place with him.

Photo: Dad driving his Gleaner combine

“No, no kids … I was sent to find a key… long story.”

The combine rattles empty of beans and Dad steers back to the field for another load and I have time for one round with this man who taught me land’s song, this song that sings in my veins.

He’s watching pods roll in and I tell him about travels down old roads and aged memories and names I found again, and the pain of not finding Aimee’s. And he shakes his head, says that’s a day, a story, he wouldn’t wish on anyone, that he’ll go looking for her stone, dig up her marker.

He glances up, looks towards the end of the field and that row of wagons.

“Here’s a story.” Dad slows down for another clump of beans.

“Ever heard of Brent Wagons? They’re all over the country; come out of the States somewhere. I always thought that a strange name for a line of wagons: Brent. Turns out that the man’s son died building a grain wagon.” Dad’s hunched over that steering wheel, watching the header knife cut down beans.

"And the boy's name was Brent."

The sadness chokes him.

“His boy may be gone, but his dad remembers his name. With every wagon they build, he writes his son’s name. The land’s dotted with his son’s name.” Dad shakes his head with emotion.

The road’s led to who we are.

Buildings age, and so do we.

Time moves on and so do we.

The road keeps stretching out ahead, and so we go, looking for a place where everyone knows our name. But maybe the road in the rearview mirror, the names and places of where we’ve come from, speak our name in ways only the past can.

The geography of space shapes the geography of soul.

And living near dirt is where we belong, this place where He who made us from the dust of the ground knows our name, never forgets our name. This is where we belong, where grass can’t grow up over who we are or vines shade the traces of our way, where our name is etched where it can never be lost.

On the palm of His hand.

This dust will return to the Hand who formed this dust, whose carved our name into His.

Photo: setting sun over soybean fields

I reach out, pat Dad’s knee. “Yes, fathers remember.” My throat catches too.

“You’re a good dad. A good dad.” He shakes his head but I nod and we don’t need to say more.

The key I’ve brought back is one I hadn’t known I lost.

Our names are never forgotten by the Father we long for.

Father God, we are known. Known. You know, never forget, our name. In You, Father whom we long for, we belong. In You, we're found.

"See, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands." ~Isa. 49:16

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