For my grandfather, prairie was church.

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Sundays he would wander his 480 acres, checking its health. He might walk the fences with a bucket of staples, fencing pliers, and a fence stretcher, or hitch the horses to a wagon with a roll of barbed wire and the other fencing materials.  Later, I can remember him going out with the tractor and wagon on the same errand.

As he drove around the fenceline, he could hear the rhythm of the tractor engine and the jingle of stapes and tools bouncing in the wagon bed. When he found a breach, he’d turn off the tractor so he could hear grass wind, the smooth legato call of a meadowlark, and the gentle clank of the windmill pumping water at the top of the hill. A breeze might ruffle his hair and sing in the tightly-strung fence wires. He might be semi-conscious of pinpricks of wildflowers, blue verbena like tiny candelabras, purple poppy mallow hiding in the grass, and the persistent sunflowers. He probably carried a machete to cut them when he found them, releasing their strong, acrid scent. He would smell cool sweet-grass crushed by the tractor wheels, like sliced cucumbers.  

He could see the patterns of his mind on the land—terraces and waterways to hold the soil against tillage; a passage for cattle, from pasture to pasture, under the bridge; dams across the seasonal creeks to hold spring run-off; habitat areas set aside for wild creatures; osage orange posts and barbed wire confining cattle to the least productive acres.

I removed the last hedge post in 1992, remembering that it had been there for three generations—the very last of a carload he’d bought when he moved his family onto the home quarter in 1926. I imagined him digging the hole that post sat in for seventy years—by hand through concrete-hard yellow clay.

I found something spiritual about digging out the remains of that broken post, something composed of family and land and abiding mystery.