I was going to go and make sure, once and for all, that this land stayed mine to decide about, in a way not one of my three children could ever undo.
I drove into Amarillo, to the office of a lawyer named Ted Hensley, a man I have known since we were boys and who has never once talked down to me. I laid it out plain across his desk, the way my son had laid those papers across my table. Ted listened, and then he told me there were more roads open to me than my children wanted me to believe.
So I took them. I put the whole spread into a trust, tight and legal, with a conservation easement laid over the top of it. What that means, in plain talk, is that my land can never be paved into lots. Not by me, not by my kids, not by any developer with a checkbook. Long after I am buried out there beside my wife, that ground will still be ground, still grass and sky and the bones of the place my daddy worked before me.
And I did one more thing. My oldest grandchild, a girl named Katie, is the only one of the whole bunch who ever loved the farm the way I do. She used to ride out with me at dawn when she was small, quiet, watching the light come up over the fields. She is grown now, and she asked me once, shy about it, whether she might work the place someday. I named her in that trust as the one who keeps it going.
Then I drove home. My children were still in my kitchen, still sitting over the old table that had been my wife, waiting for the old man to come to his senses. I hung my hat back on its hook, and I told them what I had done, flat, the way I say things.
The papers to sell were dead on arrival. My son started up about how I did not understand, how I was being stubborn, and I let him talk, because hollering never plowed a field. When he ran out of words, I said the only thing that needed saying. It was my decision after all. It always had been.
They are not happy with me. Two of them barely call now, and I feel that, the way any father would. But Katie comes out every Sunday, and we walk the fields together, and I show her the things my daddy once showed me. The land will be in good hands.
I am seventy-eight years old. I have let a great many things go for the sake of peace. But a man gets to choose what happens to the ground he bled into, and I chose. And when they lay me down out there someday, I will go into earth that will still be earth for a hundred years.