I’m looking at a photograph of a bearded Romaine Tenney on his hay mower hitched to draft horses in a half-cut field. Tenney, whose Vermont farm was slated to be swallowed by Interstate 91, immolated himself, rather than be forcibly moved. My son says, I may go of for an adventure, but I will always come back here! He points to the ground. Tenney went off to war, came back. Didn’t leave ever again. He was offered resettlement funds when the interstate was zoned, but what would such funds mean to someone partnered with a specific meadow? Our neighbor’s barn is full of hay despite it having been inordinately wet—so wet mushrooms explode across the forest floor. Tiny fungi are probably sprouting in the hay bales, too. Meanwhile, chanterelles sit in wet towels in our fridge. Inside dead trees, fungi battle, erecting zone lines, secreting pigments of obnoxious hues. Such spalting is also evident in humans as differing skin, hair, and eye colors. Place colors us. Cornrows are canerows in the Caribbean. When I was growing up here in Vermont, kids used to close the bus windows whenever we passed The Stinky Farm. A boy named Cecil with an enormous cowlick in his sandy hair got on at that stop. I always envisioned the cows licking him. Tenney, even in arthritic pain, refused the electric milk machine neighbors tried to foist upon him. He milked by hand and let all his animals go before setting fire to his house with him in it. The rain is soft. I wish I knew where to put the grief. There is nothing; no gutter. Everything floods. The confusion is even nature’s own. The earth’s eminent domain is unarguable. She’ll right herself, but will we? This summer my son and I built a paddock, felling dead trees for posts with a handsaw and an ax. That was when April called, out of breath. Get a second opinion, I told her. This was after April’s mother died. April hadn’t known what to do with her mother’s house in a neighborhood that wouldn’t give her its worth. She shopped, instead, for a security system. We know ‘homelessness’ is a measure of belonging, not a lack of home ownership, she once wrote. When forcibly removed from any real relationship with place, person, animal—who, then, are we, April?
From Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April (Tupelo Press, 2025) by Spring Ulmer. Copyright © 2025 by Spring Ulmer. Reprinted by permission of Tupelo Press.