I Mark My Life In Change

And It All Eventually Becomes A History

I’m crying in my kitchen. It’s not the first time I’ve cried in this room. It’s seen a lot of my tears. On a sunny December morning in 2017 I sat at the kitchen table sipping coffee and checking the first of my work emails when my mom called. This was before my son was born and phone calls between the two of us were rare. Every other week at most.  

“I just had to tell someone,” she said as soon as I picked up. “Dad just called. There was an accident at the farm. They were laying tile and hit a gas line. He thinks Rory and Ryan are dead.” 

She said it just like that. So matter of fact. He thinks Rory and Ryan are dead. My dad’s business partners. A father and son. Mid 60s and early 30s. Dead. 

The floor dropped out. I slid from my chair, became a puddle. “I’m heading to the hospital,” she said. 

“What can I—What should I do?” I asked.

But what could I do? I lived over a hundred miles away. In another state. She just needed to say it, to tell someone because it was too much to keep to herself. So I did the same. First dialing my brother and then my best friend.

“Don’t google it,” my best friend told me. “It’s already all over the news.” 

I googled it. 

Lee County, Illinois. Accident. Today.

And there it was.

Helicopter news teams from Chicago were already circling the site, the John Deere tractor still smoldering, the red pick up truck, the one that I sometimes drove as a teenager, a melted shell nearby.

I closed my computer, put my head on my kitchen table, and cried.

I mark my life in change. The closing of doors. The teetering on the edge of everything unknown. 

The accident. 

The selling of my childhood home.

The death of my grandfather. 

The burning of my grandparents house. 

The leavings. The starting over. The making new. 

I don’t like to go home, even though that is what I still call it, home. I tried to get far away from it. Leaving the flat of the Illinois prairie for the hills of Middle Tennessee. But the midwest called me back and so I came to the driftless country of Wisconsin, the cold north. I made my home along the lake and traded cornfields for miles of Wisconsin forest. 

I don’t like to go home because there is nothing left of the home I once knew. The topography of my childhood is gone, smoothed over, leveled off. Sold. 

In late March of 2018 we auctioned off the farm. The farm that my grandfather started. I stood in the loft of the machine shed as they sold buckets of screws and bolts and then combines and trucks and grain elevators and everything that made a life. Everything that created us. Everything that gave us identity. 

It was an accident. A tragic thing that no one could have predicted. But to move on from that. To uncouple from an identity that no longer exists. How do I do that? 

Sometimes I wonder how I will tell my son about everything that happened. How will I make him understand what it was like to lay in bed on a fall night and listen to the tractors rumbling in the field. How will I show him where we come from, when there is nothing left to show, not even the land. 

Today, I am crying in my kitchen, because change is knocking at the door again. We are leaving this place, my family and I. This home that has kept us for over half a decade. This space that kept my tears. Another ending that I’ll have to mark somehow. 

Everything ends, I know that. No story can go on forever. Everything—eventually—becomes A History.