Taft, California

Steve Edwards

Lincoln, Nebraska

A RECLAMATION PROJECT of sorts, our backyard garden is what makes the little white house my wife and I rent in Lincoln, Nebraska, a home. Before coming here for graduate school five years ago, we’d lived in a one-bedroom tenement apartment that looked out over a busy intersection in Boston. Now we look out at heirloom tomatoes, stargazer lilies, sunflowers, and zinnias. Nebraska was a place neither of us had ever been before, a place we could discover together and make our own.

Our first full summer here, chatting over the fence with a neighbor, we learned that the house’s former owner had been a botanist, and that the entire backyard and the empty lot next door had all been garden. We soon discovered remnants of his work everywhere. In the chainlink fence grew the nub of a grapevine. Tulips and rhubarb and asparagus sprouted in stray patches in the grass. We cleaned up what could be cleaned up, restored what could be restored, and did our best to learn the lessons the botanist had written on the land.

Some of the lessons were easy —grow strawberries by the garage and you can eat a handful on your way to the car. Others were more subtle and mysterious. From the neighbor who’d told us about the garden, we learned that the botanist and his wife had had three daughters, two of whom were twins with autism. In the backyard, the twins had planted two trees, a crabapple and an apple, so close together that over time their trunks had fused. The crabapple is big and bushy, branches like the sprung-open ribs of an

I WAS STUNNED when I read Jeremy Miller’s “The Colonization of Kern County” (January/February 2011) in Orion. I spent my childhood years growing up on an oil lease six miles outside of Taft in Kern County. My father was an engineer for Honolulu Oil Corporation. Miller writes of the grim environmental and economic consequences of steam extraction of heavy crude oil in my home county beginning in the mid-1960s, and the impact it has had on my hometown. While I was not surprised, a part of me was shocked and grieved. I walked around for several days deeply disturbed that the land I had grown up on was heavily polluted and somehow scarred.

I am a weaver, and I turned to my art to help re-establish a lost sense of place. The weaving I created is a re-visioning of the territory of my childhood, which I left behind in the early ’60s.

For me, there was an upside to being a kid in the oil fields. It was big, wide-open country, a good place to roam the hills, ride my bike, and go rabbit hunting with my dad. This blanket is my answer to the current environmental disaster in the oil fields of my home. It is a map of the lease, our house, our neighbors, the shops, the ice house, the bunk house, the roads, the trails, the cli= where we played, the ditch with the pipes over it, the dust, the resident animals. It is not a denial, but a remembrance.

umbrella. The apple is long and slender,
its limbs rising vertically to catch what
sun they can. Our neighbor had to point
it out—two sets of blossoms, one white
and one pink —before my wife and I even
noticed. Now it’s something we look for
each spring, this dual blossoming, and
the quiet reminder that this place we call
home had a life of its own long before our
tenure here began.