Return to the Family Farm

“Yes, mother, I know how to get there, still.”

“No, mother, I’m not goin’ to need an allowance– you realize I’m a grown woman now, right?”

“What?! No, I ain’t ‘gonna drink any of dad’s booze. What is the matt– I’m hangin’ up the phone now, okay? Bye.”

Kristen huffed, rolled her eyes for nobody’s benefit other than her own, and did her best to recreate a ‘slamming the phone onto the receiver’ gesture that modern life could afford her: she jammed her thumb into the glass touch screen of her phone to hang up the call. Who did her mother think she was these days? It’s not like she knew what went on at college. She didn’t know that by the second week of her stint in the dorms, she had spent four or five nights passed out on a musty sofa while a party raged on around her until well into the evening. She didn’t know that on the first night Kristen tried a jello shot, she also had her first thirteenth jello shot. Most importantly, her mother definitely didn’t know that same infamous jello shot night, she had also hooked up with not one, but two guys that she didn’t even bother to collect phone numbers for after the sun came up. She stowed her smartphone in the cupholder and grasped the steering wheel of her Jeep with her freed hand.

The aging, rusting Jeep Wrangler bounced down the gravel-and-dirt pathway that subdivided swaths of bending, swaying grasses that stretched out as far as the eye could see. The swards surrounding her parent’s ranch were vast, and mostly unbroken, save for the occasional interrupting vein of a river’s offshoot that had, over time, tattooed themselves onto the swells of green that terminated into a horizon-grasping expanse of prairie. Trouble was, Kristen had spent the last four years of her life navigating the creaking old Jeep through the tight, concrete-lined pathways of the faraway urban center of New York. She was a country girl turned cityslicker who was now about to spend the first summer post-degree doing her best ‘country girl’ impression. As the axles of the rapidly deteriorating vehicle whined and strained while they trundled up what, to her, was barely a road compared to the asphalt she had grown accustomed to, she felt like she wasn’t exactly doing a knock-up job. She had never quite rid herself of that ‘cowgirl’ accent, though.

She careened the complaining vehicle into a hard left as the gravel inexplicably shot off in a random direction. At this point, she could see the farm house sitting pretty at the crest of a hill. Within walking distance of the sprawling, two-story house was the tall-sided cliché of a ‘big red barn,’ which stood next to the paddock that kept the horses. As she rounded the vehicle off into what was, mercifully, the final hook of the winding driveway across the fields and up to the house, she studied the horse paddock off in the distance. She had spent the last four years thinking about everything except horses. Somehow, they represented to her everything that was ‘life on the farm.’ Horses were everywhere when she was a child. They grazed the fields alongside the roads. People rode them to her high school. Being a girl fortunate enough to be raised out under the open, blue sky of the rural countryside, Kristen had spent her fair share of time on horseback. However, the amount of dressage-obsessed teen girls that she had grown up with was enough for Kristen to assign everything equestrian as the primary target of her teen rebellion. When she turned fourteen, she threw out all of her horse-print notebooks and stationary and swore to never again saddle up another one of the equine beasts.

Of course, she was a twenty-two year old woman at this point, and that maligned teen angst had overstayed its welcome. She laughed to herself, smirking at the thought of how stupid the whole feud between her and those muscled, powerful creatures had been. The summer out here was going to be long, and she figured she might as well go pay a visit to the paddock at least once while she was home. Maybe she’d even take one of the big boys out for a ride. Her pitiful Jeep would thank her for the reprieve. Kristen piloted the Jeep up to the front of the house and cranked down the brake pedal. The juddering vehicle slid to a halt, kicking up some pebbles and stones in its wake as the Jeep’s rear wheels locked up. After killing the engine, she gave the steel steed a reassuring pat on the dashboard.

“Thanks for getting me here, ‘lil buddy,” she whispered to her companion as the overheated motor muttered its tick-tock panting from underneath the hood.

Kristen twisted around, reached into the back of the her chariot, and eased the strap of her duffel bag up over her shoulder. The toll of spending the entirety of the three-day journey in the saddle of her Jeep kicked in the moment she slid her rear end off of the cracked, yellowing leather of the front seat and her feet hit the dirt. She groaned, leaned back into the vehicle, and stretched her legs. Lamenting the decision to use the trip back from college as an opportunity for a road trip, stopping in cheap motels and for fast food where necessary, Kristen began the trudge up the steps to the front door of the ranch house.

***

“Mom, dad, I’m home!” Kristen called out just as the pleated curtains of the front door’s window flapped in the breeze caught up in the door’s swing back on its hinges. The rickety front door closing behind her, Kristen slipped a thumb up under her duffel bag strap and crept forward across the squeaking floorboards that sounded like they had passed their centenary while she was off partying at college. She turned through a nearby threshold and into the kitchen to be immediately treated to the sight of the back of her kid sister’s brown-haired head. She was hunched over her laptop at the kitchen table, tapping away at the keyboard.

“Hey, kiddo. Aren’t you glad to see your big sister?” she inquired.

She watched as Cara wiggled one of her hands back over her shoulder in a dismissal, then extend a finger towards her ear to point repeatedly.

“.. yeah, sorry, no, that was just my sister. She’s back from college– no, it’s fine, I can talk still.” Kristen listened as Cara reassured whomever she was speaking to on the phone through earbuds that she wasn’t busy in the slightest.

Kristen rolled her eyes, pushed a lock of her own chestnut brown hair out of her face and decided to make for the stairs. She needed to check out her room. She hadn’t been there in years, but was comforted by seasonal status checks provided by her mother that it was being treated with dignity. Her space had been converted into a craft room for a time, spent time as an office for dad while he was out of work, and was finally rehauled back into Kristen’s temporary living quarters in the weeks before she arrived back home. It just wasn’t economical for her to come back to her home state of Nebraska every holiday, so her parents had assured her that it would be fine for her to save her money for grad school instead and that they would mind the fort. She turned the familiar corner at the top of the splintered, old wood of the stair set and arrived just before the door to her childhood domain. With a delicate push, she opened the door and walked inside.

The room was nothing like she had remembered it, and she attributed that to the fact that her mother appeared to have put the room back together using memories of Kristen from when she was about thirteen years old. Framed posters of old stallions kicking up dust as they reared up lined the walls. Some of them were saddled up by gleeful-looking girls grinning from cheek to cheek as they posed for the camera. American Girl dolls sat on the bookshelves, sporting the leather cap and riding crop of equestrian of the starlets that they were.

“Holy shit, what the fuck, Karen..” Kristen whispered, looking around at the overwhelming decor that screamed ‘I’m a horse girl and I’m proud of it.’ Determined to solve this problem later, she slung the shoulder bag off and down onto the handmade quilted duvet on top of her bed – at least that was the way she had left it, she sighed.