Old White Horse Road

A short history of the landscape that formed me.

Photo by Mark Timberlake on Unsplash

As a child, I stared at the line where the brown scrub field met the cool shade of the forest. I watched and waited for something to step out from the quiet loam of the trees.

I knew I would recognize this thing I waited for, tall and ancient as an oak, when I saw it. I imaged him with human features, his head antlered, regal. He would be a curious stag who gathered stories, an unlikely librarian of a land that held the patent on secrets.

The land that raised me was red clay packed brick-hard in the long, summer droughts. A shovel just scraped the surface.

My father and I lived on the last five acres of what once was a sprawling legacy of farmland. Divided among cousins, spliced by roads and thickets, our neighbors were proud beyond reason. They held grudges. They preached forgiveness so well and often that I would spend years trying to parse their gist because I couldn’t find an example of their practice in action.

My great-aunt prayed verses passed down by a circuitous and ever-changing method: mother to son, son-in-law to cousin. I tried to map it like a family tree, but the lines kept blurring into a twisted trunk. The prayers she uttered were said to call the heat out of burns and to stop wounds from bleeding.