Often I am permitted to return to a meadowĪs if it were a given property of the mind Joe is now deceased, but the oral history of Joe’s connection with the land is reminiscent of lines within Robert Duncan’s poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow:”

My neighbor says that the cardinals protected Joe for a few minutes from the knowledge that he was bleeding heavily. He said he saw a few red cardinals dotting the snow in front of him, just out of reach. He pictured himself on the hillside where he used to sled. The story goes that Joe, after the initial impact of the explosion, imagined that he was in a snowy, silent place. He trained at Fort Leonard Wood, got shipped off to war, and was hit by mortar. Not too many years later, Joe was drafted for the Korean War. Most recently, my neighbor said that Joe used to sled with his brother down the steep, nearly half-mile hillside that is closest to my family’s portion of the land. My neighbor is the one who tells me about Joe Little – he’s shared stories about him for over ten years, so many iterations that I can no longer separate what is myth from what is remembered, what is truth from what is wishfully imposed on the past. Rather, our street and our collection of houses, called Little Mountain Acres, are both named for a man named Joe Little, who was raised on the land and lived on the land until he died. Little Memory Lane, though, isn’t meant to make memory diminutive. Our gas station is the Mule Express, complete with a painted, polished wooden sign of a braying mule, where a group of gray-haired men talk over Styrofoam cups of coffee each morning. Our houses, most overlooking the lake, nestle in the woods. Our town, located in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, probably invites sentimentalism as well.

The sign, with its precious name, almost begs to be taken: Little Memory Lane. Tourists, we think, are responsible for stealing our street sign once a summer, sometimes more often.

The meadow by james galvin