“Uncle Joe, is it true our family has a homestead?” I’d spent my first twelve years of life in a California suburb, a far cry from the farms and woods of my Missouri relatives.

“Well, now.” My great-uncle rubbed the back of his sun-reddened neck.  “Who told you that?”

Despite the shade creeping at the edges of my uncle’s lawn, I wiped sweat from my face. Missouri heat felt a lot like being smothered by a hot, wet blanket. “Uncle Donnie. He said to ask you to show it to me.” I added hopefully.

He laughed. “He did, did he?”

“What’s funny?”

“Oh, nothing.”

Then why were his eyes gleaming? I frowned. “Where is it?”

“Not far from here.”

“Will you take me to see it?”

“Soon.”

“When?”

He cocked a grizzled brow. “Maybe tomorrow.”

But tomorrow brought no homestead visit, nor did any of the other days during the weeks I stayed in the little house on Pea Ridge.

Every night, my aunt’s hair shone like a halo in the kitchen light as she bent over the Bible spread open on the table before her.  My cousin Judy and I would call goodnight, then climb the ladder into the small loft to giggle until gently scolded. After that, our whispers passed back and forth in the darkness until one or the other of us fell silent.

By day, we picked blackberries, searched for fool’s gold, or wandered in the thick woods surrounding the house. We would come back from blackberrying with mouths stained purple and our buckets low, but somehow that night after dinner a blackberry pie usually appeared. I sometimes watched Aunt Ethel make the lattice for the top, marveling at the deft skill of her hands.

Blackberry scratches stung something awful, but we took them in stride. We got into poison ivy while visiting the Civil War grave on the property, and Aunt Ethel gave us the laundry soap with the command to wash off outside. Chiggers were another problem, collected as we lay on the lawn watching lightning bugs and gazing at stars like diamonds set in a black velvet sky. I counted it worth the itch. The memory of stars so bright they burned right into my eyes remains with me today, while I’ve mostly forgotten the misery of chigger bites. I must have calculated right.

At night you could sometimes hear a panther screaming in the hollow. I was never exactly sure where the hollow was, but it sounded a mysterious place. There used to be wolves, Uncle Joe told me, but when the government put a bounty on them, they stopped howling at night.

Years passed, and I stayed away from my Missouri kin for too long. By the time I returned, I had to visit Uncle Joe and Aunt Ethel in the cemetery. That was hard to take, and I clenched my fists as tears ran down my face.

When I mentioned to my Uncle Jackie my wish to finally see the family homestead, he laughed. “Jan, did you really think it was somewhere else?”

Turns out, all those years ago, I’d been sleeping in its loft.

My uncles loved to play pranks, as Judy and I found out when we were taken snipe hunting. We spent an hour calling “Coo-ee!” while holding an empty pillowcase open and shining a flashlight into the woods.  Smothered laughter from those woods eventually gave the culprits away. It was all in fun, nothing you could hold against them.

Uncle Joe had been playing a joke on me, in the family fashion. He may have meant to set me straight at some point, and then forgot. I’m sure it never occurred to him that a simple joke could deny me a vital connection with my heritage. Either way, he and Aunt Ethel gave me far more than this took from me, and I’ll always be in their debt.

The family homestead remained in the family, and one day I returned to it. The house was smaller than I remembered, with vacant windows staring out, and happy children scampering about the lawn only in my memory. The woods surrounding the house were thicker now and a little eerie. Had I really traipsed through them with my cousins? There used to be a path to the Civil War grave, but it had gone the way of the bounty wolves, the way of old Bohemia. The land of my ancestors no longer exists as a separate kingdom. Even the term ‘bohemian’ has taken on other meanings.

I turned away from the homestead, having paid my respects. Life moves on, and none of us can turn back time. It’s the way of it to lose people and places.

And yet…

What if I could recapture the best parts of the old lifestyle and bring them forward?  I could teach homesteading skills as I learn them, preserve something of old Bohemia, and, best of all, inspire myself and others to live well and leave a legacy.

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