The Color of Us
I’m looking at a photograph of a bearded Romaine Tenney on his hay mowerhitched to draft horses in a half-cut field. Tenney, whose Vermont farm was slatedto be swallowed by Interstate 91, immolated himself, rather than be forciblymoved. My son says, I may go off for an adventure, but I will always come backhere! He points to the ground. Tenney went off to war, came back. Didn’t everleave again. He was offered resettlement funds when the interstate was zoned,but what would such funds mean to someone partnered with a specific meadow?Our neighbor’s barn is full of hay despite it having been inordinately wet—sowet mushrooms explode across the forest floor. Tiny fungi are probably sproutingright now in the hay bales, too. Meanwhile, chanterelles sit in wet towels in ourfridge. Inside dead trees, fungi battle, erecting zone lines, secreting pigments ofobnoxious hues. Such spalting is also evident in humans as differing skin, hair,and eye colors. Place colors us. Cornrows are canerows in the Caribbean. WhenI was growing up in Vermont, kids used to close the bus windows whenever wepassed The Stinky Farm. A boy named Cecil with an enormous cowlick in hissandy hair got on at that stop. I always envisioned the cows licking him. Tenney,even in arthritic pain, refused the electric milk machine neighbors tried to foistupon him. He milked by hand and let all his animals go before setting fire to hishouse with him in it. The rain is soft. I wish I knew where to put grief. Thereis nothing, no gutter. Everything floods. The confusion is even nature’s own.The earth’s eminent domain is unarguable. She’ll right herself somehow, butwill we? This summer my son and I built a paddock for the dog, felling deadtrees for posts with a handsaw and an ax. That was when April called, out ofbreath. Get a second opinion, I told her. This was after April’s mother died.April hadn’t known what to do with her mother’s house in a neighborhood thatwouldn’t give her its worth. Eventually, she settled for a security camera. Weknow ‘homelessness’ is a measure of belonging, not a lack of home ownership, she oncewrote. When forcibly removed from any real relationship with place, person,animal—who, then, are we, April?
