That first summer, I looked up Grant Ostrander’s Denver address on the county tax records. And I wrote him a letter.
I kept it short.
I said my husband grew up on that place. I said his mother had planted the lilacs by the front porch. And I asked if I could keep them watered.
He called me about a week later. He was polite. A little puzzled.
“Sure,” he said. “Water whatever you want. I’m only out there in November.”
So once a month, from May to September, we drove out on a Sunday afternoon. The four of us. With two five-gallon buckets and a garden hose we hooked up to the hydrant by the barn.
Luke mowed the road ditch along the front of the yard. From the mailbox all the way down to the culvert at the end of the driveway.
The county mowed the rest of the road twice a year. But that stretch by the house had always been June’s. She’d always kept it nice.
The second winter, a county snowplow clipped the mailbox post and laid it over flat in the snow.
It wasn’t Luke’s truck. But it was Luke’s department.
He went out there on his own time with a post-hole digger and a bag of Quikrete. And he set a brand-new post. Plumb and solid.
We never once went inside the house.
We never went in the barn.
We watered the lilacs. We mowed the ditch. We picked up the shingles the wind tore off the machine shed roof. And then we went home.
Walt went to every one of Cody’s Little League games in those four years.
He sat in the top row of the bleachers in his seed cap. He clapped when Cody got a hit.
He came to Hailey’s band concerts. He came for Thanksgiving and Christmas and every birthday.
He was polite to me. I was polite to him.
And neither one of us said one single word about the farm. Not once. In four years.
It sat there between us at every meal like a dish nobody would pass.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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