Finding the holy land
By Mitch Jayne

The snow began at noon. Like most December snows—a flake at a time but big as nickels—floating down to land on Roman Sanford’s Levi jacket. It was fun to raise his wrist to look at flakes the size of childhood snow, which immediately shrank with his breath and were gone. But there were plenty to follow, big lazy flakes that spun down from the huge storehouse of the blade-colored sky, eager to stick to everything.

Roman glanced first at his watch and then at the facade of the high school, wondering if his 13-year-old sister Ginny had noticed the snow beginning. She would have to see it through the windows of the band room. A member of the small high school orchestra, she was rehearsing her cello solo for the Christmas concert that night. Ginny wasn’t just good, she was amazing—the only Sanford who had ever shown musical genius, and Roman was sure she would shine tonight.

Standing beside the idling pick-up, Roman realized that this could be serious snow, and he needed to get his sis home. He wanted to get his chores out of the way and allow her to prepare for her big night. He was probably going to be busy helping his dad get hay to the cattle. It was work Ginny liked to be part of, but he figured she would pass on that today.

Neither of them minded snow any more than their dad, Frank Sanford, did. They all saw snow as a great opportunity to mix work, fun and adventure. Roman and Ginny loved challenges like rounding up and using their young eyes to count scattered cattle in darkening pastures, in a confusing blizzard of whirling flakes.

Like their mom, Suzy, the kids knew the cattle as well as Frank did—maybe better—since Suzy had always encouraged them to find names for the cows, mess with them, and invest them with personalities, just so that they’d know them when they saw them. Roman and Ginny already knew the land as well, the ravines and thickets. They knew how to find lost calves or cows and knew what to look for. Spinning hay off great round bales, filling the feeders with supplement was child’s play for Roman and his sister. Clearing ice off the automatic waterers, even chopping holes in the three ponds and all the water tanks when Iowa cold crept down from the north was a kind of game for teenagers who grew up on the land and were part of it.

But Roman worried that this snow was going to mess up his sister’s concert if it made the roads dangerous on Christmas Eve, something town kids didn’t have to worry much about. There was no way he would have swapped places with a town person, but his sister deserved her night in the limelight, and the Sanford farm didn’t have a snowmobile. Roman grinned to himself feeling silly—all this over a few flakes of snow. If the family’s Jeep couldn’t make it, neither could an audience.

Roman shook his head, wondering at the way his mind puzzled things these days, like a pup wooling a shoe. His folks didn’t do that. They never questioned the world and never doubted that the farm was a chosen way of life for them, not just another way to make a living, and their kids had caught the difference.

It pleased and sometimes amused Roman to know that to his parents the farm was a 400-acre estate to live on and delight in, and both he and Ginny had inherited that “estate” feel. Not in rich or poor terms, just as a place in the world where you looked around you with pride and appreciated the abundance of things only you knew how to do.

Roman got back into the truck to get warm, turning on the radio to get an idea of the snow, which definitely was looking more like a white Christmas with every passing minute. He had to turn on the wipers to see the door where Ginny would come out, hoping that someone inside was noticing the big flakes piling up.

The news that he had to cope with in order to get weather was its usual mess. A lot of the world is at war, fighting over places he couldn’t even pronounce. Roman had a hard time figuring out how the wars were going for any of these distant people; Arabs, Jews, Iranians, Russians, Koreans, Chinese and people in Pakistan, who whatever the reason, seemed determined to solve their problems by exterminating people.
It made no sense to Roman, who grimaced after a bit and switched to a music station, not waiting for the weather. At 17, he was impatient with everything these days. He sat tapping his fingers to rock while he waited for some action from the band room door, behind which poor Ginny was trying to be very good at something while the world was busy disintegrating.

At last, people started to emerge, including Ginny, packing her big cello case and he blinked his lights until she spotted him. It took only a minute to put her instrument into the camper back, make sure she was buckled in and start home, but the flakes pelting the windshield already seemed the size of Post-It notes and Roman drove very carefully. The snow excited Ginny; her rehearsal had gone well, and she perked like a coffeepot while he drove.

Roman tried to keep up with her running commentary on boys, music, snow, the concert, Christmas holidays, more boys, how well she’d played Mozart, and how hungry she was, but Roman’s mind was in big-brother mode, concentrating on the road they would have to drive again tonight for the concert.

In the back of his mind was the gnawing concern that this world his sister would inherit was a lot worse than any snowy road, more threatening than any test, more challenging than any concert where you got a chance to prove yourself with your rare skill.

Finally, about the time they turned off the main highway to the comfortable one that led toward home, he put his thoughts together and got a word in edgewise.

“Ginny,” he told his sister, “I want to ask you something while your mind’s cooking. No big deal, but I want the opinion of somebody who hears things different than I do, like Mozart, CNN or rap stuff. Are you cool for a quiz?”

“OK,” she said, smiling at him, and waited. Her brother always listened to her, and this could be one of his “supportive” questions he often asked to make her feel good about knowing an answer.

He surprised her. “Look,” he said, “the way things look these days, I may end up getting drafted, Sis. That’s OK, I love my country and I’m good to go, but not to go fight on somebody else’s ‘Holy Land.’”

He tried to keep his tone light, but Ginny heard the worried edge. She turned to look at him as he got to his question. “How can you have a ‘Holy’ war, anyway? What’s your take on somebody’s ‘Holy Land?’”

The best thing about asking Ginny a question, he had found, was that her brain went to strange places but always came back loaded with cargo. “Google Earth,” she said finally, and at his wondering look, she added, “I’ll look it up before supper. It’s that computer search engine that takes you places.”
“You’re going to Google for the Holy Land?” asked Roman dumfounded. “That’s your take on me maybe going to war?”

“No,” said Ginny. “It’s my take on stuff I need help with. Computers are world-sized brains, which mine isn’t.” She patted his hand on the wheel, “Just take us home and we’ll get Dad and Mom in on this. They love the computer age.”

The Sanfords also loved Christmas lights and already had them on when the truck pulled into the driveway. Colors flashed from the roof edges and evergreens through the curtain of flakes that were now small but steady. The window lights of home were comforting beneath the slate colored sky. The house said, “Christmas is here!”

It was dark before Frank and Roman came back from chores, knocking snow off their boots. They smelled the wintertime aroma of ham and beans, greens and cornbread, and after washing up, they started for the dining room.

“Not so fast,” came Suzy’s voice from the den. “Come in here you two. Ginny’s found something she thinks we all need to see.”

Roman, who had shared his worries with his dad, grinned at him, “I told you, Dad. She said ‘Google Earth.’”

They entered the den to find Ginny at the computer console. They joined Suzy by looking over her shoulder. On the big screen was their farm, easy to recognize—even from the miles-away satellite image. The pasture fields, ponds and built-onto barn were giveaways as was the great winding service road they had graveled. The screen view was familiar, matching the big plat map on the den wall.

“OK, that’s us,” said Ginny, who with the click of the mouse began slowly zooming the image outward. The farm beneath them sunk away and became part of a county and then a state, and magically, the Midwest, with the Great Lakes creeping into the top view of the screen with the Gulf at the bottom. She kept withdrawing gradually, past the continent’s borders, past oceans, up into space.

“And now, at Roman’s request,” she said, “my careful and exacting research, based on my great Sanford sense of history has come up with…” And here she zoomed the image back to its distant satellite with its view of the entire planet. “Ta Da! The incredible, much advertised and universally admired HOLY LAND!”

In an instant the four of them were looking at their own planet, blue and striped with clouds, hanging like a Christmas ornament in space, haloed by sun. Nobody said anything for a minute, or needed to.

Finally, Roman, feeling he had caused all this, thought to speak. “Well Merry Christmas world!” he said slowly. “I do believe that answers my question.”