Truth and the hunt to find it.

 There comes a time when you've seen enough, done enough, and heard enough, that you step back from the crush around the Buffet Table of Life and say, "Enough is enough".  You have clocked a lot of experiences, some you can discuss, some you won't and some can't.  Some stuff you figured out, some you're still working on and some you are coming around to accepting you never will.  You thought you were keeping an eye out, but in too many still shots of too many facets, there's mounting evidence your life-tide has peaked and is in retreat.

There comes a time when none of the above sets off any alarms.  You don't check overnight deliveries, you don't check with Berlin, you don't check world headlines, in fact you don't do anything.  Except to pour yourself a second cup, grab the last three Oreos and head for the sun room. It was cold and clear last night, with sunrise the the frost crystals should be brilliant on the thermo-pane window glass.  You settle into the sofa and wait.

This isn't your first frosty morning.  You step out of yourself, drifting in time and see this wiry not-quite-a-teenager standing motionless listening with half an ear to the Lister as it warms from a cold start, slowly working the vacuum pumps to a point the milkers can function.  You gaze silently out the small milk house window. Alternating your focus from the fresh snow atop the drooping head of the dead sunflower by the silo, and the frost crystals doing the dance of the Mandelbrot as your breath collides with the frigid pane.

You were far from poor by local standards, and far from well-off by government standards.  You considered yourself well nourished, what with the large garden-now in the root cellar, and fall butcherin' hanging in the smoke house, and lets not forget the stack of library books beckoning from the card table in the parlor.  Life was pretty good, it really was.  Everything you ever needed was squirreled away either in the attic, the cellar, the wellhouse, the barn or the library...well, almost everything.

You always knew you wouldn't stay, it wasn't the hard work or the isolation...it was something out there calling you by name. Your mom and dad knew, though it was never mentioned.  You climbed on the bus with a diploma, an address of the admission's office down state, a name and phone number of a distant relative on dad's side with a cot and a job opening. In the front pocket of your jeans, a roll of wrinkled 20's to the tune of $460 (mom said they had been skimming the milk check since you were 9 years old),.

As you take a bite from the last Oreo you drift back to the present...thinking how fast the intervening years had passed.  You had been a good son, visiting when you could, you paid cash and had an Amish crew bussed in to reroof the barn and house.  You had a new well dug. You dutifully hand wrote letters addressed to both detailing what you were doing and always remembering to inquire what milk was going for.  When the end came, it came fairly quickly; Dad was found by the propane delivery driver, halfway to the barn curled into a fetal position, felled by a massive heart attack.  You convinced your mom to move to town, into assisted living where, she, much like the ancient Baldwin apple tree by the mailbox, which after you dug about it's clay-bound roots, pruned the branches and spread a sack of fertilizer, had new blossoms like it was 40 years younger. 

She passed the spring of the second anniversary of dad's funeral.  Just shy of a year from her passing you spent a week at the home place putting things in order. A year and a day from her funeral, in the predawn hours, you walked the long lane to the back forty, jumped the fence, crossed the gravel road and knocked on an old neighbor's door.  Your last stop before leaving town was the bank and the courthouse where you signed all the necessary paperwork to acknowledge acceptance of the offer, and begin transfer of ownership of the farm to the old neighbor you had visited. That was with the exception of the house, barn, all the out buildings, miscellaneous old farming equipment as well as 22.5 acres that included access to the hill spring to the north and the creek to the southwest.  Those, you had titled over to Russel E. Buck, aka "Rusty Bucket", a life long, sometimes "hired man" of your father.  Rusty was a good dependable worker who lived down by the edge of the railyard in a rundown house filled with kids an beagles.