aubrey; chapter five
I’m staring out the window, blindly watching the blank country whiz by because what else is there to do, and—
I remember this road. I remember that barn. That old wood-and-wire fence. That perfectly climbable tree. There’s a strange hollowness, a reverberating ache in my chest as I follow the old trail of half-remembered trees, houses, boulders, even the field of faraway brown and white cows. Before my heart has time to catch up, the yellowy-brown farmhouse comes into view, the front nearly masked by overgrown shrubs that seem to be in a contest with the wild-looking apple tree thirty feet away.
My aunt pulls into the short gravel driveway. The whole thing is so out of place with the development-style split-levels surrounding it. This house was obviously a farmstead, and as farming went out and land increased in value, they must have sold off the fields, parcel by parcel. How invading it must have felt to watch your home—the grassy plains of your youth and innocence—be dug up and cut up into little squares. Now, it’s a farm of scrabbling little suburbanites, who take and take and never fallow the sickening field.
“Okay,” Aunt Debbie says. She hands me a box of garbage bags and cleaning supplies. “You ready?”
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