Mennonite Forest

Released from the pickup, I'm instantly snow-ankled but I'm also down-coated and piqued, that is to say, doggone in wonder at the stand of ratty Chinese elm let grow at the edge of the circle, a circle here being the swath of a sprinkler system pivoting itself around a wheat field, and my father being the last one to let any inch of land go to pot.

Go on, take a look, he says.

I enter the forest. This part of the world being underrepresented in forests, this part of the world barely supporting its trees and those being mostly bare-assed cottonwoods, it is a vision, this forest. Not that the Chinese elm is much more than trash, water-sucker trash. But Dad hates trees so the appearance of a stand on his actual property, a guy who axes the slightest growth of vegetation if it doesn't bear grain, makes it worthy of inspection.

We have just come from a lilac farm. He had to make that place sound like the plants were milked or fed or at least a real crop so as to be acceptable to his shunning of trees, but we did agree that it couldn't be called a lilac ranch. There was no herding involved. Rows of every lilac variety and color showpieced the place, plants ten feet tall and in bud, if not bloom. We stood on clumps of plowed dirt between the rows and sniffed and warded off bees in the snow.

I want to say there was a reason for this stop at the lilacs, to commemorate this or that or even to buy a plant but similar to the stop at the elms, we were just in exit, meandering home, to his, not mine. I'm three thousand miles off, and here just to keep house for Dad for two weeks.

Drive close to the lilac farmer's house, he said once we were finished with sniffing, and keep your eyes peeled for the baby grand inside. I wheeled us awfully close to a formidable pink bush in the front yard. The house will never sell, he said. A place with enough room for a piano like that?

He rolled up his window on the snowy spring air, with the bees falling to the ground, having too much snow on their wings. I maneuvered back out onto the gravel and down the road.

There's where the Mennonites turned out that fellow. He pointed away from the piano-cursed property.

The house was no plainer than any other in the area: flat ranch, driveway, front door, only a touch plainer than the house we had left behind, with its piano room. Turned out why I asked.

Dad fooled with the heater. Right up to that front door walked a twenty-five-year-old man, he said. A twenty-five-year-old man. My father shakes his head at the number.

I was by then waiting at the stop sign for directions. He motioned for me to go toward that fellow's house, across a road as straight as a line drawn across the county. He said the twenty-five-year-old knocked on the door and when the man answered, they both nearly had a heart attack.

Sounds like a fairy tale, I said.

It was. They looked exactly alike. No DNA test necessary. The man had to leave his wife and kids and move away.

We passed the place.

I guess Mennonites aren't big on forgiveness, I said.

Dad laughed, then scumbled the inside of the windshield with the chuff of his hand to get rid of the haze we were making, breathing. Let me take you somewhere.

We drove to this circle corner I am walking into, with its forested bit. The Mennonites use it, is all he had time to tell me before a corn-planting, fertilizer-bearing friend came up out of the dusty snow-covered spring light in his pickup.

The first trees of the forest, when I reach them, are only about seven...