Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

A Proper Home

They packed all their things into trunks and set off for parts unknown. A strange feeling to reduce a life to possessions that could fit neatly into these boxes, everything folded, taken apart and tucked away, to be reassembled elsewhere. But nothing ever goes together in quite the same way again.  

That turned out to be the simplest step, one heavily tinged with anticipation at what was to come. The long journey – first by rail and then by wagon – proved trying and tedious. They shared a cramped car with dozens of others similarly uprooting their lives and casting their hopes on lines on a map some surveyor had drawn decades ago. Who knew what awaited them.  

Once they disembarked they found a half dozen others who were homesteading in the vicinity of their quarter and agreed to make the rest of the journey together. They purchased a wagon and horses, as well as some tools and farm implements and lumber – all at an inflated price, but they had little choice. It was a journey of two days by wagon and these passed without incident. They marvelled at the treeless horizon they passed, nothing but grass and sky as far as the eye could see.  

As they came near their destination they parted ways with those who had shared their journey, everyone branching off to find the surveyor stakes that marked the line on the map in the earth. Their own was nestled in a valley, dotted with small sloughs still gleaming with water in places. At one they found a spring that flowed continuously and they decided to build their house nearby. Later they would find rings of stones on a small ridge where the wind blew clean and kept the bugs away.  

The first few nights they still slept in the back of the wagon while they broke the land, cutting sod out of the ground. They used the sod, the lumber and even some of the wood in the wagon itself, to put up a shack into which they put their possessions. Even when it was finished it still felt temporary and would until they managed to build a proper house. Life on hold, except it wasn’t. They broke the land, planted crops and a garden, harvested it and took the two day journey north to sell it.  

When they finally moved into that proper house two years later there were still things in the trunks that had never been taken out. Though they considered passing them on to someone who could use them, they did not, returning them to the trunks which they used as furniture at the end of beds and sofas. It was a comfort of sorts that some part of that past life and past home was still here in this new one.