Strip from me all that is me, and what remains?

The land remains.

Take from me my home, my garden, the promise of enduring love and the prospect of love anew, take from me my arms and eyes and ears and tongue, extract my heart and bury it amid the rubble of a life once cherished and what is left?

The land is left.

There are small trees here, struggling to wrest light from the live oaks’ morning shade, and I planted each one. I planted each one. One must plant trees without expectation, and I have eaten well of these trees’ fruit nonetheless, and yet. And yet.

Granny Smith’s roots leach lime from my true love’s bones.

The Bishop pine I planted from a one-gallon container, half expecting it would die, half assuming I would drink its shade in fifteen years. Long, drowsy days in a lost, imagined future and I mourn them. It is waist-high, breast-high in months, and I will not be here to fix a hammock to it. Who comes after I leave might cut it down.

The pull of hearth and I resist it, the tug of memory and I resist it, the binding of shared paths and I resist it, and all that persists the earth I walk on, the earth whose paths open up and lead away from here. Places beckon full of memories I never had, red earth and juniper, coyote caught singing in the monsoon’s false dusk, a roar of unexpected waters. Sorrow threaded with bright joy.