I Choose My Land

The farm is looking fine this morning. Standing up here, cup in hand, I can look down the slope and see the rows of my crops stretching down the hillside, to the fence at the bottom of the valley, where the stalks seem to spill over, bobbing their heads above where the river flows. This was my mother’s farm, and her mother’s before her, and it has never looked better than it does now. This is not because I am a better farmer – my soil is only so ripe because of the generations who have tilled it before me.

When I was a child, I did not dream that I would stay on this farm. I thought about following the long road past the village, across the plains, out and out to the city. When the time came, I would get a job there, in an office. I would marry and live in a house on a street with a fence around a garden, and I would hire someone else to look after that small plot of land, so I wouldn’t have to work it with my own hands. Anything else seemed like failure to me.

I had these dreams because without them only one future existed: staying on the farm. This would not just have meant staying on the farm. It would have meant staying at home while my brothers went to school. It would have meant watching them move to the city and get the jobs while I lived here, married here, had my children here. These were my only two options, stay or go, and when I was so young and the whole world was a forked path, I would run through the fields and imagine I was sprinting down that distant road, away.

In fact, my life has not taken either of those paths, because nobody’s life works out as simply as we imagine it will as children. It’s funny, I think, that children are always admired for being so fantastically creative, when it seems that adults are being just as creative all the time – imagining new lives for themselves and making them real. That’s what I did.

I did not have to watch from behind the fence while my brothers went to school. Instead they held my hands and I tripped along the path just behind them, until my legs grew longer and my feet more steady on the rough ground and I began to outrun them. I sat at that old wooden desk and held my pen and filled my head with all the things I hadn’t been certain I would ever learn. And after that I went to the city, to the university, where I sat at more desks and held more pens – and where I learned that the city was not the place for me. Gradually my dreams of a house and a husband and a garden fence faded from view, and I woke up each night from dreams of fields and shimmering sunsets and my mother working the earth.

And so I returned to it. Her earth, now my earth, and as the years have passed I have watched my hands turn into her hands. Sometimes I take a handful of ground and hold it to my lips and remember that I am tied to this land not by shackles but by blood. I am here because I want to be, and because I was taught that I have the power to choose.