Landscape as Orientation: Inheritance

We moved from Ohio when I was in fourth grade. 1978. I loved it there. A small town that knew itself. Friends who showed up without calling, even knocking. Summer heat that meant something because winter had teeth.

We lived on an acre—Concord grapes along the fence, corn in rows, strawberries low and reckless, blue spruce holding like buttons. Evenings came naturally. A cul-de-sac, a streetlight, a wiffle ball bat worn down, hide-and-seek that ran until someone’s mother leaned out a door and called a name. Real Cokes, full sugar, passed from hand to hand. No phones. No screens. Parents inside—cards, television, the low murmur of adult life continuing without us. Kids outside way passed dark, where they belonged.

I was oriented. I knew where I was. At ten, I knew who I was becoming, even if I couldn’t have said what.

Then, suddenly, we were driving to Texas in our Chrysler Cordoba followed by a U-Haul. I didn’t know why. I didn’t like it. No one asked if I agreed, and I wouldn’t have anyway. I didn’t have language for what was being taken, only the certainty that something precise was slipping out of reach. Did my parents know what I had? I don’t think so. Most people don’t recognize orientation until it’s gone.

No Grass. No Trees. No Friends.

We arrived—not even Fort Worth, not really. Suburbs laid out with a plastic ruler. Geometry everywhere. Houses rising in formation, raw and identical, the land shaved flat to receive them. A yard the size of a promise already broken, not even seeded yet. Dust instead of soil. Heat without relief. No trees, not one, to argue with it all, or to give me a sigh. No friends. No edges. I didn’t know where to stand. I was Ovid—sent from Rome to the edge of the Black Sea, fluent and useless all at once, writing letters no place could answer. I didn’t have exile as a word yet. I just knew I couldn’t read this place. I didn’t know where to stand. I was disoriented. My mother and I talked about it recently. For the first time. She told me there was one night she walked out onto the clay and dust after we arrived. Stood there alone. Looked up and asked God where she was. She never let any of us see that doubt. She was—and still is—the center of gravity in my life. Hearing her say it didn’t loosen that bond. It tightened it. She had been human. I asked her why she never talked to me then, as if I were fifty-eight instead of ten. I had the same questions as she, the same God. The same unease. She said what I expected. That wasn’t my job, son.

One afternoon I was in the backyard. Heat pressing down. Wind pushing grit into everything. Our fort-like privacy fence half built, posts sunk and standing in lines, more geometry closing in. The yard felt smaller by the day. I looked down at the dirt. Something caught the light. I scraped at it with my nails. Spit. Wiped it on my skin. A shape emerged. Too precise to be nothing. A fossil. Strange. I started kicking at the ground, too hard. Went to the trash and pulled out a metal coffee can—Maxwell House. Good to the last drop. The best we could afford on a postman’s salary. I dug. Fossils everywhere.

The yard became something else. Bigger. Deeper. It stopped being a yard at all. It became my own Lascaux—an unremarkable patch of ground that turned out to be a record, a place where time had been waiting for someone small enough, bored enough, lost enough to notice it. I excavated that summer. Filled my suitcase and shoeboxes with fossils. And I felt like an explorer, a researcher, a fossil hunter. No internet. Encyclopedias. Dewey decimals. Real work.

That was the day things shifted. Orientation returned, not to the place, but through it. I hadn’t found something old. I’d found something again. The boy left behind in Ohio. He wasn’t the same. But he was me. And he was here.

Soon grass covered the yard, a few trees planted. The fort erected. Friends arrived. The ground closed back over its record. I shook hands with the Ohio boy and moved on.

But the landscape had already done its work. 47 years go by. Not gradually. All at once. The last year was disorienting beyond my capacity to describe...yet. For me. For my child. The kind of year that breaks sequence, that refuses narration. There were days when nothing held. Days when language felt useless. Days when the only honest thought was I don’t know where I am.

So I took Grace back to Texas. Not in a U-Haul. We were coming back. It was eighty-two degrees when we arrived. December. The windstorms of Orcas Island left behind for a while—their violence, their insistence. Here the air just moved. Warm. Dry.

Grace and I hadn’t planned anything. We took my sister’s dogs out because they needed walking and because walking was something dogs and people can always agree on.

There was a park nearby. Not grand. A strip, really. A creek bottom spared by accident or ordinance, pressed thin between neighborhoods that had grown up and grown old since I’d left. The floodplain held. Cottonwoods leaned. The ground dipped just enough to remember water.

You could hear the creek before you saw it. That sound still works the same way. It pulls. We followed it the way water does—down, without discussion.

Time Becomes Legible

I thought of the dusty fort. Of fences and posts and lines. Of how rare it is for anything to be left alone long enough to become legible again.

Grace moved ahead of me like she wanted to be the first, scratching at the dirt with the toe of her shoe. Focused. Intent. I asked what she was looking for. Fossils, she said. I asked how she knew they’d be here. She didn’t look up. Because you used to tell me about it.

And just like that, the landscape opened again—not dramatically, not symbolically. Simply enough. Enough to stand on. I felt it again. The same sensation from that backyard—heat, focus, the narrowing of the world to what was directly under my hands. Not memory exactly. Recognition. It moved through me and through her at the same time, like a current finding a channel that had never fully closed.

She didn’t give up. No shovel. No Maxwell House can. Just the toe of her shoe, nails she didn’t want to break, patience she didn’t know she was practicing. I warned her about ticks. Snakes. Poison oak. I said the words because that’s what parents do. They had no effect. Geology had her attention now. It was working on her.

So I joined her, of course. The dogs too. This was not nostalgia. This was real.

The creek bed opened into itself—walls cut clean where water had argued long enough to win. Layers exposed. Periods stacked without labels. Time made visible, whether anyone asked for it or not. I found one first. A small thing. Obvious once you knew how to look. I said nothing. I waited. Then I stepped beside her and let it fall where she would find it, the same way I used to with sea glass on Orcas when she was younger. A quiet sleight of hand. Not deception.

Assistance.

Boom! she said. Right there, dad!

She rolled it in her palm, turned it until the shape declared itself, then held it up to me—not for confirmation, just to share the fact of it. I didn’t explain anything. I just nodded. Nice one. The creek kept moving. The suburbs stayed back where they belonged. And for a moment—long enough—we were oriented again. Later, I would pen: 14. She was entering a life that didn't begin with her. She will carry something forward that does not end with me. Today, I asked myself what had happened in my yard, what happened with Grace in the creek bed. Why it feels larger than geology, or heartache, or loss. And why it still does.

Landscape, when we take our children back to the places we grew up, isn’t nostalgia. It isn’t tradition. It’s a transfer. A handoff made without ceremony.

Children live in a present that feels endless. Adults live in one that feels thin, about to snap. When we return to the same ground—the same creek beds, roads, bluffs, orchards, neighborhoods—we are quietly offering evidence. Not an argument. Evidence. That time didn’t erase everything. That change didn’t sever us. That a life can move forward without cutting itself loose from where it began.

We don’t bring them back to remember for us. We bring them because memory is more trustworthy when it exists outside the body. Stories bend. Places don’t. The land confirms what language can’t always hold: this really happened; I was once small here, and I survived 47 years of becoming. Children trust geography more than narration. I do too. We took a breath. Went home. Family was waiting.

And so was she.

My mother, the woman who once stood in a barren yard and asked God where she was. Eighty-seven now. She knows where she is. Gravity still holding.

Her job was to stay.

She did.

That's my inheritance.