I Thought The Earth Remembered Me

I’d come out to the property my parents had owned to conduct some business, which actually had nothing to do with that former ownership, or with my having lived there as a child. There was a strange sense of dislocation, to be there again after so many years, to see what had changed and what hadn’t.

I arrived, and found the new owner wasn’t there. I called her, and she asked if I could wait there for about twenty minutes. I walked out into the pasture where my parents had kept a succession of steers and goats. They had grazed there, the steers to be raised until they were ready to slaughter, the goats to generate milk for a few years and then also to be slaughtered. I remembered the taste of that milk, cream floating on its surface, and the meat of the goats also, gamier than the beef. I remembered someone claiming that goat’s milk had a “billygoat stink”, and my replying that if goat milk smelled of billygoat, they were milking the wrong goat.

I recalled Summer afternoons when I had lain on the grass, too hot to move, feeling as though I could hear the heat as well as feel it. I lay down again, willing myself to feel that same sensation, even though the day was actually quite mild. I felt the ground beneath me, and felt…not especially connected to it.

I lay there for a minute or so, trying to feel something more than I would lying anywhere else. The ground felt good under me, in spite of its irregularity and the sharpness of the grass, but that was all I felt, the same as if I had been anywhere else.

I got up and walked back to the house, sat on the front step, pulled out my phone and checked my messages.

https://www.ikedacenter.org/thinkers-themes/thinkers/poems/oliver

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Just because you remember doesn't mean they will. Same for a place as with a person."