It was there I learned to spell garter snake. I thought before that it went like gardener.

We wore tough gloves like canvas with rubber fingers, pulled thistle out of the hard ground, I stole arms full of mint and basil and chives, nibbled with my mom, hands caked in sticky soil, making it easier for life to come.

It was there that I learned red paint tends to be expensive.

Someone told me that red paint has gold in it, gold like the cornfields, gold like the eyes of the kid that my mother delivered—elbow deep in a bleating goat—and time was tarnishing as it passed on Cornman Farms.

Like the time she told me they are more scared of you, after I shrieked, almost stepping on that snake, while trailing behind, in circles around the white house, she looked closely at the yellowed siding, the clogged gutters, the crumbling front steps, and then they surveyed the land, my mother and the invisible snakes, which grew in number to frighten me.

But I remembered that they are more scared of me, and most importantly, that they might bite but can’t kill, as if they would ever try, and even if they did, my mom told me I was bigger and stronger than I thought, and I was learning what it meant to survive, what it meant to be right next to a snake, a tree, a goat, a sheep, and my two best friends, but I no longer speak to those girls—Lucy and Coco—we grew in separate directions, three boughs finding their way outwards through damp spring air, and we had to do it that way, I only remember there being no choice, and I think she goes by Lou now, Coco has a younger sister I never met, so maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but then they weren’t either.

The hands on the barn clock never ticked from one second, one minute, to the next, so the time slid instead, shiny like the smell of fertilizing manure, glistening like the peacock that roamed those 30 acres, only on about five of which were we allowed to walk.

That’s where the playhouse lay on the edge of the wood, the playhouse I begged to paint red, but we never got around to painting it, maybe we were never going to, maybe a fresh coat of paint is just a fantasy, but whole farm felt like a fantasy, brass fixtures in the big white house, the swing in front of it, and those big old tress which were brittle and dead and needed to be cut down—but I didn’t want those trees to be gone, and maybe they are, now, but back then they weren’t because back then there was nothing larger than an old tree, and trees seemed to know things, like where they were and how thick their trunks were.

And it was on Cornman’s acres with Lucy and Coco, like that one time I got my boot suck in the marsh, that I forgot to pay attention, but I did, I paid attention to the thick warm air inside the white house, the purple blooms that framed the shed, and I wanted so badly to have paint with some gold in it, paint like dark blood, which poured out of that Mother pushing out her child, and the baby goat’s head was so much bigger than I thought it would be, I learned the name for a baby goat that day—kid—while my mom brought that kid into the air, I walked to the back of the barn and to the right and found the salt lick, which apparently goats and sheep need, and there were so many goats and so many sheep, I saw them when I turned that corner, because past the corner the breezeway opens and there’s the pasture, and there are the sheepdogs, and there is the mud that stole my boot when I wasn’t paying attention, but I was paying attention, and there was so much free space with a long dirt road where Lucy and Coco and I sat in pick-up truck trailers, hay scraps clinging to our fall jackets.

And that white house might be red now. I might have learned how to survive.

It was there, and we were, too. And I’m not fully sure who we were, at the time or now, but we filled up space, and when we moved, the space did too. We were there, but the farm was there first. We watched it come alive for just a few months, before it all fell apart, in ways we were never told, only that adult relationships are complicated, and I guess they were, because they ripped me away from the farm before I could start knowing how to pay attention.

I want to whisper in my young ear lift your head to the sky once in a while, so that I can remember, now, how blue and clear it was, how there was nothing between me and it. Look out at the field, scream loudly.