TWENTY YEARS ago on the first of April 1975, I parked my car on the edge of town and did a drawing of a gnarled box elder between Burke Heaton's house and the driveway where milk trucks used to back in to his milking barn.
The tree intrigued me for several reasons.There was a step ladder leaned against it, and a plank across two of its branches gave evidence of a child's vision somewhere in the recent past.
But the knotted trunk suggested that the tree was quite old.
Box elders were common in the yards of early settlers. I was particularly interested in this one because Burke's house had once been the home of my great-great-grandfather. I wondered if this tree might have been planted by him or by his son, Joe Beck, my great-great-grandmother's little brother, who owned the house after him.
How strange it was that I had passed the tree so often in my life, never considering its personal connotations.
In his reminiscences, Joe Beck refers to his childhood home with mixed emotions: ". . . Often in the night during rainy periods my mother and father would get out of bed, take down curtains and cover up articles of furniture to protect them from the rain and mud as it would drip through the dirt roof."
Now, almost a century later, Burke Heaton was living in the house, and though much altered and improved, it still carried the aura of a pioneer house with its adobe walls and rustic setting.
Quite often, as young teenagers, Lionel and Lowell Austin, Brent Bateman and I used to go down to Burke and Carolyn's, just to hang around and help with the chores. Never once did I think of the house as a part of my own legacy. It was always Burke and Carolyn's place.
So frayed was the fabric of the past in my awareness that all of my emotional links to the place had been woven in a whole new cloth.
We enjoyed being there during milking time.
I can still hear the rhythmic slushing of air through the milkers and the white, creamy liquid being sucked up in transparent plastic tubes and piped into the next room, where it emptied into a large stainless steel tank. Inside the tank, paddles stirred the milk in swirling eddies - almost more milk in one place than I could imagine.
Burke's dad, George, would often be in the milk barn during milking. He used to tease us a lot. We ate it up. And he used to tell us stories about southern Utah, where the Heatons had lived before moving to Alpine.
About the time I did the box elder drawing, Veloy and I were buying milk from the Heatons. Some-times the kids would go with me to pick it up. One of them recently recalled getting milk at Heatons as one of their earliest memories - the image of turning the big spigot and watching milk gush into glass gallon bottles.
What a complex string of places and experiences leave their mark, influencing our life's imagery and, at the same time, the imagery of others.
Now, for the most part, the Heaton farm is gone. Burke and Carolyn moved to northern Utah several years ago, and their own sons and daughters are scattered to the wind, like grain seeds prayerfully aimed toward deep furrows.
George and Bertha still live next to Burke's place, which Harvey Hutchinson owned for a while after Burke left. But I think it's been sold again since then. Someone new is using my great-great-grandfather's several-times-remodeled, thick-walled adobe nest as the core of their own private dreams.
Or it may be a rental. Which, hopefully for the renters, amounts to the same thing.
The walls that protect us from the elements, whether leased or purchased, become imprinted in our consciousness, shading us like a mother's cupped hand against the ravages of storm and sun.
Somewhere the milk is gushing from open spigots.
I can almost hear it surging into thin, tin buckets.
And there is the sound of voices, both those long gone and those of infants not yet born - in fact, not even yet imagined - shooting out from our feet like giant roots and gushing streams.