And when autumn and winter came, another landscape appeared.  I had become the self-appointed surveyor of seasons on the farm.  My mission was to be a witness to a time and a place.  It was that time of year in my life when being a witness was of the highest calling.

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My brother and I survey the condition of the barn and surrounding buildings.  The wooden chicken house—the long building where our mother tended flocks of chickens—is rotting rapidly and soon will be beyond repair.  Earlier in the week I found the lines in a recent poem by Robert Bly:

                                       The Harvesters will come in at the end of time

                                         And tell us that the crop of ruin has been great.

A crew of archaeologists will arrive later this morning to make systematic probes into the oak know that rises from the marsh.  The hope is to document the occupation of the land by the Potawatomis before European settlement.  My great-grandmother Bridget told my father of seeing the Potawatomis returning to the place where they had once lived.  The archaeologists will also begin to document the settlement of the farm by generations of my family.  Someday we will be among the old ones who once lived here.                                                      -July journal entry

July Journal Entry