Dozens of long, bent shadows painted the ground beyond the many fence posts that surrounded the back half of my father's property. The elongated silhouette of the fenceline slowly crept across the fall maple leaves that mantled the chilled soil with every subtle movement of the sun's cyclic decline. It was November of 1921, three years after my mother left my father for a whiskey bottle and a poor sap of a fellow named Bingham and two years and ten months after my father secured himself a cozy piece of real estate along the Hudson River in a large concrete of a place referred as Sing Sing Correctional Facility for murdering a poor sap of a fellow named Bingham.
Although having been boarded-up for nigh on three years, the old farm still smelled thick and bitter, like fresh, tilled earth and dried cow manure. There was a weathered hammer jutting from the flat top of one of the fence posts, its rusted head was driven-in and stuck in place by its nail claw. I pulled at its sun-bleached handle and held it firmly. I considered my father's use of the tool to drive in the countless fencing nails and carry out hundreds of tasks. I held it to the sun; and with as much force as I could muster, I launched the hammer in the direction of the empty, overgrown hog pen and cursed.
The clouds in the late afternoon skies scattered with the onset of the evening winds. The tall, unmowed, and yellowing hay in the pasture bent and shifted in color with the air's fragile movement. A plume of dust whips-up at the edge the grey, wooden barn; an aged tree line clatters its dried leaves; and, a small meadow lark shifts and weaves within the changing currents, she acknowledges me as she passes overhead. Notwithstanding its emptiness and potential, all elements of this land seek refuge elsewhere.
A long, bent shadow attaches to edges of my heels as I turn my back to the property that my great-grandfather cleared by hand and passed down to those with whom he deemed worthy.
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