On The Things We Kept

A farmhouse list

We kept a bag full of bread ties, each from a loaf of sliced, white bread that my father used for sandwiches in the field.

We kept plows that horses had pulled and rusted hand saws, meat hooks and a butcher’s block, and a potted cactus on the back porch.

We kept purple bells of glass, insulators from the depression era that had topped the county telephone lines, that had surfaced after plowing the field.

We kept a line of mason jars in the basement, clear and blue BALL jars with old metal-latch lids, a few small ones with fruit patterns, though my mother never canned.

We kept recipes from the women who had been there before us.

We kept tune with the coyotes at dusk.

We kept chore clothes: ones we could get as dirty as we wanted. They had holes in the knees and holes from welding sparks and they were perfect.

We kept our high beams on when we drove home at night, to catch the sheen in the mule deer’s eyes.

We kept rows and rows of canned goods, that far from town, so we might stay for a week, might stay forever, diced tomatoes and refried beans and black olives, green beans and corn, water chestnuts and canned soup.

We kept a mouse trap on the pantry floor.

We kept track of the stars. The crooked W of Cassiopeia above the lilac tree in spring. The bucket of the Big Dipper scooping on winter nights, pouring out eternity when it was hot.

We kept trying to keep the dust out of our house, fine as silt, blowing in through the cracks of the old windows, down the chimney, under the door seal, up through the vents.

We kept finding wolf spiders.

We kept The Grant County Journal as kindling, burning through front page news and obituaries.

We kept allergy pills in the top drawer of the desk, because my mother was allergic to dust.

We kept glass pickle jars and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter tubs and aluminum cans.

We kept generational stress.

We kept the arrowhead that we found in the basalt canyon behind our home.

We kept a lock on my father’s shop.

We kept Visine eyedrops in our fridge, so my dad could drop them onto his eyes, cool, when he came back from the wind-scratched fields.

We kept wondering when the wind would stop blowing.

We kept a jar of Mount St. Helen’s ash, which had sifted in when my father was young.

We kept a 50-gallon tub of rice after we discovered my brother was gluten intolerant, “for when the world went to shit,” for the irony of being surrounded by all that wheat, nothing to eat, for fear of lost independence.

We kept pulling tumbleweeds off the west side of the house.

We kept the stock market on the television.

We kept the oven at 170*, the lowest setting, to keep dinner warm for my father, coming in late from the field again.

We kept our emotions to ourselves.

We kept picking cheatgrass out of our socks, our underwear, our jeans.

We kept missing the rain.

We kept a light on in all that country dark: a 15-foot-tall vapor light that drowned out some of the stars, that drew in desert bats, shadows cartwheeling after the thick miller moths, frenetic.

We kept seeding the fields for another year.

We kept bread ties, so many bread ties, an embarrassment of bread ties. Light blue and yellow and white, each plastic bit in the same shape of a house with a hole in it.