The Land Remembers

Summer Fields

There are blackberries at the edge, at the rock pile where the mower could not reach, returning this year as they did last and the one before that. A basket against the wall in soft sun yellow through the window glass, waiting where left, last I was here.
Raspberries too, mixed in briars, on a hillock rocky and rough. They gather together, the young boys, mother and sisters, picking, the talk turning to stories of family.
Always the summer fields blue of flax waving in a breeze, golden in wheat and oats, timothy green and haystacks, haystacks so high, in winter a ski hill taken by hand-carved wood and a brave spirit.

And Uncles, my Uncles, mythical, able, quiet, sharing a smile and a gift.
Today, when sun-time drys the field, the chaff will billow and the golden grain will settle, up and down on a field harvested a boy’s imagination runs rich with wonder.
Lift you up, set you here, feel the world as it was, new, fresh, giving, unending. Grain bins filled, deep in the seeds of summer fields.

Line defines the boundary, giving shape to the object, a shape hard against the Red Lake lands.
Acres vast and back, down gravel road turned dirt we were there under sun seeing the mower cut and the rake gather and storms approach. In low light, back against the woods, black and sleek the panther moves.

Hands rough and strong and words soft and loving she brings us in, in from the fields where she tossed the hay and rode the machine, agile, swift, stacking high for a winter long; now in the sun filled room opening the berries picked and canned overflowing with summer and love.
Hands kind, hands able, Margaret’s hands.

The things we are made of.

Memory is a negative, brought to the darkroom, steeped in the fluids of time with highlights and shadows brought forth to view in black with white showing the very bones of it or fleshed out in color the way night turns to day.

Lines and shapes, all we have here. The last, the other, form is memory, memory is form, bringing it to life, giving it substance, making it real. Land has memory, it knows, it feels.

The land remembers.