Last week, we signed a pile of papers -- the last of three closings to save the land where we live.
The first closing -- Dec. 15, 2020 -- was for us to buy the 130 acres that has been part of my husband Ken's family for five generations and central to our dreams for close to 40 years. The second closing -- June 13, 2024 -- was to give our development rights on the land to the Kansas Land Trust which, in turn, will protect this land as a natural habitat in perpetuity. The third closing -- Aug. 5, 2024 -- was to sell two 21-acre-or-so parcels to dear people who share our vision. The sales also helped pay down most of the big-ass loan we took out to save the farm.
It's a strange thing to scribble a signature on papers full of numbers, maps, and lengthy legal descriptions to move land from hither to yonder because the land, as we know, is here and has always been here in one form or another. Each time we've returned home after a closing, we feel some degree of human relief, but for the most part as if nothing and everything as changed.
Our buying, preserving, then selling some of this land to others who also love it has not changed one iota of the land. There's not one less tick in the woods or any more chiggers in the grass (although all we need do is step into the fields, and there'll be dozens less chiggers out there and more in here, driving us crazy). What we've done makes no difference to the wild turkey population, deer mating season, or where the turtles are going to stay cool in the heat. Birdsong takes no notice of a pile of treasured papers, ensuring this place stays this place. The hummingbirds still dive-bomb each other and, come fall, the hackberry balls still dive-bomb my car windshields on occasion.
Yet for the humans co-habitating here, each closing is a symbolic little leap of joy and bigger stretch of, "Oh, that just happened?" Over the last four years we went from "owning" five acres to 130 acres and now down to 90 acres, but I put "owning" in quotation marks because it's such a nebulous concept, a seemingly made-up thing in the face of this place. Truly, the land owns us as well as all these other migrating-through (including us eventually) inhabitants.
Meanwhile, I grapple with the reality that what seemed so impossible five years, 18 years, 29 years ago (and so on) was and is possible. Change, even big change, can happen slow or fast. While the recent presidential race landscape transformed everything at the speed of sound (and soundbites), this has been a slow burn from insecurity to security, fear to calm, danger to relative safety, anxiety to something like peace.
I find it hard to believe this has happened. I used to say about myself that I did everything fast in life except grief, which I'm a super slowpoke in comprehending and tunneling into and through to whatever lingering loss remains. I guess I'm like this too with whatever is the opposite of grief: the sense of something you thought you would or could lose isn't going anywhere. Ken and I spent so many years freaking out, praying to the ancestors (who we're now thanking regularly), filling computer docs and notebooks with plans and ideas, mourning the crashing and burning of all those plans and ideas until one made it through the eye of the needle.
My interior landscape is also riff with gratitude at the same time this exterior landscape is buzzing, humming, and chirping with late summer life. Our friends who have bought these parcels are such good people: two who have rented space for their trailer here for 30 years, and the other who looks forward to creating a little refuge for himself while continuing his lifelong research of snakes and spiders.
In many ways, having multiple owners on the same conservation easement -- although the Kansas Land Trust people (who I'm also eternally grateful to) tell me all this made for the most complicated easement they ever granted -- loves up this place in triplicate. Whoever they pass on or sell their land to will, because of the easement, also need to love this place too.
I thought of calling this blog post, "The tale of three closings," but then I realized it wasn't about anything closing. It was the openings innate in this land staying this land. In an age and location where prairies and woodlands are so often bulldozed into property and housing developments, what happened here opens the against-the-odds future for this place flourishing on its own terms.
Yes, nothing changes here beyond the usual and unusual seasonal tilts and evolving woodlands and prairies as well as the generations to come of deer and bluebirds, butterfly milkweed and katydids. And that's the point.
What a good and brave thing to have done. Bravo! Brava!
Caryn and Ken, I'm thrilled for you. Your generous and loving spirit, in concert with this beautiful land, serves all of us. Thank you. Diane