The Four Winds

“She knew,” Grandma says gently. “And now it is time to go.”

“How can I leave her?”

“You won’t. As she will never leave you.”

In the distance, I hear Ant’s laughter. I turn and see him and our golden retriever running this way, bumping into each other. Grandpa is waiting by the windmill to drive me to the train station so that I can go to college in California, in a city near the sea.

California, Mom. I’m going back.

Unbroken.

“A train does not wait,” my grandmother says. “Do not dawdle.”

I hear her walk away and know that she is giving me a last moment here alone, as if the words I have been unable to find for years will suddenly come to me. “I’m going to college, Mom.”

A breeze moves through the buffalo grass; in it, I swear I hear her voice and remember her long-forgotten words: You are of me, Loreda, in a way that can never be broken. You taught me love. You, first in the whole world, and my love for you will outlive me.

It is a single perfect memory. A goodbye that gives me peace and courage. Her courage. If I have even a sliver of it, I will be lucky.

Be brave.

It was the last thing she said to me in this world, and I wish I’d told her that her courage would always guide me. In my dreams, I say, I love you, I tell her every day how she shaped me, how she taught me to stand up and find my woman’s voice, even in this man’s world.

This is how my love for her goes on: in moments remembered and moments imagined. It’s how I keep her alive. Hers is the voice in my head, my conscience. I see the world, at least in part, through her eyes. Her story—which is the story of a time and land and the indomitable will of a people—is my story; two lives woven together, and like any good story, ours will begin and end and begin again.

Love is what remains.

“Goodbye,” I whisper, although I don’t really give the word away, I hold it close. I look at her headstone, see that word, the one that will forever define her for me: warrior.

Smiling, I turn and look back over the farm that will always be home, where she will await my return.

But for now, I am an explorer again, made bold by hardship and strengthened by loss, going west in search of something that exists only in my imagination. A life different than one I’ve known before.

Hope is a coin I carry, given to me by a woman I will always love, and I hold it now as I journey west, part of a new generation of seekers.

The first Martinelli to go to college.

A girl.