“Probably.”
Dale pointed his cane.
“That hurt.”
“What?”
“I was hoping you’d say something wise.”
She laughed.
They sat beneath the oaks.
Dale looked at the ground.
“No dust.”
“No.”
“Road used to turn brown every March.”
“I remember.”
He nodded.
“I wish your grandmother could see this.”
Opal looked around.
“She did.”
“What?”
“She saw enough.”
Dale understood.
Ruth had never needed sixty-foot trees to believe.
She had recognized the direction earlier.
Maybe because she remembered what the land looked like before everyone accepted degradation as normal.
That became increasingly important to Opal.
Memory defined baseline.
If one generation inherited damaged land, they might treat that damage as natural simply because they had never known anything else.
Ruth remembered prairie plants.
Black storms.
Soil movement.
She had context.
Opal’s children remembered trees.
They had a different baseline.
Opal made sure they saw photographs.
Not to create guilt.
To preserve scale.
This did not always look like this.
People did this.
Then people changed something.
The land responded.
Not instantly.
Not completely.
But measurably.
That was hope without mythology.
In her sixties, Opal still carried a notebook.
Not always green anymore.
The newest one had a black cover.
The stack went back more than forty years.
Rainfall records.
Storm notes.
Tree mortality.
Soil tests.
Bird observations.
Failures.
Experiments.
Questions.
She still walked the rows early.
Before Nebraska heat built.
Kurt sometimes joined.
Often he did not.
Age had given both of them permission to enjoy different routines.
One morning, a group of young agricultural students arrived from a university program.
Their professor introduced Opal like someone famous.
Opal disliked that.
She preferred introductions that contained fewer adjectives.
The students walked beneath the mature bur oaks.
One young woman stared upward.
“You planted these?”
“Most of the originals.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
The student laughed in disbelief.
“I couldn’t even keep a houseplant alive at seventeen.”
Opal smiled.
“I killed six hundred trees the first summer.”
The student stopped.
“What?”
“Drought.”
“You replaced them?”
“Yes.”
“How many died after that?”
“Hundreds over the years.”
“But people tell this story like you planted four thousand and they just worked.”
Opal looked at her.
“People like short stories.”
The student considered that.
Another asked:
“Were you sure it would work?”
“No.”
“You weren’t?”
“No.”
“But you spent all your savings.”
“Yes.”
“That sounds reckless.”
Opal smiled.
“That’s a better question.”
The professor looked interested.
Opal continued.
“I had evidence that the field was worsening.”
“I had evidence bur oak could survive conditions like ours.”
“I had historical examples of shelterbelt planting.”