~The Road~

I’d been lying to myself when I said that nothing ever changed back at home; there were always fewer houses. Farming was a dying profession — a sucker’s game with all the odds against the players — every time I drove into familiar territory, the wide open plains seemed wider, flatter… having less and less to do with people.
The road was mostly straight at the moment, rolling over gradual hills in what could often be an infuriating exchange Passing and No Passing zones. It would start to wind soon. I knew this area, still able to recite the mileage between every major and minor landmark for a hundred miles in any given direction, even landmarks that didn’t exist anymore, such as the old country school house that had apparently been torn down since my last visit and whose absence nearly made me miss my turn onto Vayland Road.
After a few miles, the curves began.
The farmland my family owned was on the high side of the county, raised above the lower, eastern half by a ridge of hills that Vayland Road crept along the top of, curling around cuts that were somewhere between narrow valleys and broad ravines, filled with thickets and brush that by local wisdom wouldn’t even let a breeze through without a couple of good scratches. There were barbed-wire fences on both sides of the road, although in twenty years I don’t think I’d once seen any livestock on the other side of them.
I’d grown up riding in cars along this stretch of highway, then driving myself, then driving away. The blacktop led right past the farm’s driveway.
Mom was out on the front step before I got out of the car. No one else was there.