Place and Property
written by Kimberly Shaw
I.
The same year we moved down the road to an actual house on an acre, not a trailer on my grandparents’ farm, the apple trees caught a disease and the radiation on my grandfather’s ear left him crazy and scared.
My oldest uncle decided on a family meeting. The eighty acres I grew up on was divided between four siblings. Medicare requirements for care provided without expense to the family.
My aunt who lived across the street from me was elected caretaker. Once again my grandparents became my neighbors, but now instead of smiling with ornery brown eyes or
whistling pheet-a-phia when he saw me, my grandfather would look at me in fear and anger, certain my grandmother and aunt were poisoning his milk, and accusing me of conspiracy.
I was fourteen the day I opened our front door and he walked past me to our gunshelf, pulled down his 30-06, and asked me to help him find his shells. I took him outside and sat him down, “Big Daddy, you don’t want to do this.” With clarity in his eyes, he explained life like his was not worth continuing.
He lived three more years in a nursing home twenty minutes away. My dad would get phone calls occasionally, Big Daddy had climbed the six-foot wooden fence again and escaped.
II.
In the middle of the south forty acres of my grandfather’s sandhills stood an old metal shed. When I was a little kid, my older cousin, Lee, kept his coyote-hunting greyhounds there.
“Most people caught trafficking meth in Oklahoma are described as white men in their 30s.”
The dirt road to the shed was in between our house and the apple orchard. Before we moved in 1995, the traffic to my cousin’s dog pens grew exponentially.
“‘They’re rednecks. I just don’t know any other way to describe it,’ said state Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Agent John Duncan.”
My grandpa was born in 1912. My grandpa’s dad was a bootlegger. He was one of the first people in the county to buy a motor vehicle, but he partook of his own product and that never ends well.
“‘I’m not trying to put a group of people down, but crank is a white, working-class drug,’ said Duncan, who has a doctorate in philosophy.”
My grandpa loved his grandkids, he taught the boys everything he knew about surviving hardship, growing and hunting your own food, working hard, disregarding authority.
“‘These guys are crazy,’ Duncan said. ‘They stockpile weapons and they are violent, aggressive, nasty folks.’”
My cousins and my brother grew into men prepared for another great depression, a fight for survival of the fittest, life or death decisions; the nineties were too easy for them.
“‘Like any drug,’ Duncan said, ‘people might use meth as a way to try to escape despair.’”
Four months after my grandpa died, my cousin, Lee, became federal property. While some of the guys who used to drive up and down that dirt road by our trailer bought their freedom with half truths and half lies, Lee lost seventeen years of his life. His daughter was twelve; his son five.
“‘It seems like we keep arresting the same people,’ Duncan said.”
Lee’s brother, Lyle, moved into my grandparent’s house, painted the barn red, then orange, then green, bulldozed the diseased apple orchard, tried to hang himself in the narrow staircase leading to the bed where my grandpa used to sleep.
“‘Why are drugs used in the United States? That is a very good question. I don’t think we’ve answered that,’ Duncan said.”
The judge’s exact words the day of sentencing were, “Mr. Shaw, several prominent people are wanting you to have a second chance. But since you did not cooperate to government satisfaction, and we have spent all this money on a trial, I feel I owe the government a maximum sentence of twenty years.”
III.
Twenty-three years have passed since my grandfather’s death. Lee got out of the pen on probation after eighteen. He moved into my grandparents’ house that his dad and Lyle kept for him.
His brother got off the meth, moved a double wide in where the greyhound shed used to be. Together they run the tire shop they inherited from my Uncle Hooty and host annual fish fries.
Once, when back home visiting and getting a flat repaired, a cousin expressed his concern for me, “It seems like you’ve forgotten where you came from, Kim.”
I’m still not certain how to answer.
Sources
Medley, Robert. “Methamphetamine Lab Busts on Increase.” The Oklahoman, 28 Feb. 1999, https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/1999/02/28/methamphetamine-lab-busts-on-increase/62251483007/.
Shaw, Lyndell. “‘We Thought We Were the Only Ones.’” The November Coalition, https://web.archive.org/web/20160812210358/http://november.org/thewall/cases/shaw-jl/shaw-jamesl.html. Accessed 30 Oct. 2025.
BIO
From rural Oklahoma, Kimberly Shaw earned her MFA in creative writing from Oklahoma State University in 2025. Her writings reflect her continuous efforts to understand life--what we are given and how best to carry that gift. She has work published in the Stonecoast Review and the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.