The Trek to Forever
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Epilogue
Spring came to Mills County Iowa the way spring comes to flat land.
All at once and without apology.
One morning the frozen ground was frozen ground and the next morning something had shifted underneath it and the air had a different quality and the light came through the east windows at an angle that said something had changed and intended to keep changing. The bare oaks behind the barn put out the first tentative green. The cattle moved differently in the field. The horse lifted her head and held it in a way she hadn’t held it since October.
Johnny noticed all of it.
He noticed everything that happened on these eighty acres the way his father had taught him to notice what happened on land you were responsible for. But differently. His father had noticed with the eyes of a man calculating yield and profit and the return on investment of every acre and every animal.
Johnny noticed with the eyes of a man who couldn’t believe his luck.
Every morning he woke up in his own house on his own land beside his own wife and felt it fresh. The specific unreality of having arrived somewhere you walked a thousand miles to reach. Six months of road and then this. The fire in the stone hearth. The east windows with the morning light coming through them. The chair with arms beside the fire.
The woman sleeping beside him.
He never took it for granted.
He intended to never take it for granted.
The kitchen garden went in on the first Saturday in April.
Naomi had been planning it since Indiana. Since the evenings in the Brauer farmhouse when she’d lain awake listening to the December cold and thought about Iowa soil and what she intended to put in it and what it would feel like to put her hands in ground that was hers.
She knew exactly what she wanted and where she wanted it and how deep the rows needed to be and which things wanted sun and which wanted the partial shade of the east wall and which things needed to go in first and which could wait another week.
She had been doing this her whole life. Tending other people’s kitchen gardens. Her hands knew the work so completely that it lived in her muscle memory below the level of thought.
But this was different.
This was hers.
Johnny watched her from the fence line.
He’d offered to help and she’d looked at him with those eyes and said I’ll tell you when I need you and he’d understood that this particular thing needed to be hers first. Needed her hands in it alone before anyone else’s. So he leaned on the fence line with his arms folded and watched her work and felt something he didn’t have a word for.
She was on her knees in the Iowa soil with her hands moving through it in that familiar rhythmic way. Testing it. Turning it. Reading it the way she read every space she entered. Carefully. Completely. Finding out what it was before she decided what to do with it.
The morning light came across the flat land from the east and fell on her straight and clean.
She was wearing her everyday dress with her sleeves pushed up and her hair pinned back and her hands dark with good Iowa soil and she was completely and entirely and recognizably herself.
Not Ruth Carter.
Not the assessed asset of the Calloway estate ledger.
Not the birthday girl in the Indiana farmhouse.
Not the woman in the ivory dress walking to him across the Tabor meeting house.
All of those things. And underneath all of those things and through all of those things and larger than all of those things combined.
Just Naomi.
His Naomi.
On her knees in her garden in the morning light of her own life.
She sat back on her heels and looked at what she’d done so far and tilted her head slightly the way she did when she was assessing something and finding it satisfactory but not yet complete.