No less than the journey-work.

Back to the places I grew up, where my family still lives, and where I went to elementary and then high school, where I went to church, I think to what the community must have been like when my grandparents were young. The world has not changed much there, I know. These were young immigrants, a family of brothers who crossed an ocean to work their small farms together. What was it, in that long move, which made them choose this place over any other? Location has always felt to me like a most anxious opportunity. I think about how I am someone who sits still and thinks too much, while they in their activities spent their time in simple joy. An every day happiness in working a small farm with their brothers and their wives, young families with their children scurrying behind them across great yards, dogs chasing through burrs, all shielded from the coming history that would succeed them. There are parts of those lives that I have had in my own. The sun, and the stick of grass to the sweat of forearms beneath a loose cotton shirt. In my own life, I am already long past the years when those families took a name, when their farms were built and when they would take turns to wake and work at each brother's farm to gather the food they helped to grow. When I look at my hands I see the years in them, and in the way that my grandfather and his brothers would hold in their hard hands their young children, now the ones who come to me, now on my own arms, and in the way I feel the morning.