You can have the land, but you will never have what we had with it. We knew this place before it was something to claim, before it became an idea in someone else’s head.
We knew it in the dark, in the dust, in the quiet hours when the wind told you what kind of day it was going to be. We knew every trail that didn’t show up on a map, every tree that bent but never broke, every place the animals trusted enough to rest. We didn’t just walk this land—we listened to it. We knew which ground would hold you and which would give way. Which seasons came in gentle, and which ones came in mean. We knew the difference between silence and warning. We earned that knowing.
Now it’s filled with voices that never learned to be quiet. With people who arrive with certainty, with instructions, with the kind of confidence that only comes from never having to survive here. They point, they change, they speak like ownership is the same thing as understanding. It isn’t.
And maybe that’s what burns the most—not that things changed, but that they changed without respect, without listening. Without ever asking what this place already was, long before they showed up to rename it. There’s anger in that, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. But I won’t carry it forever, because beneath all that noise, this place still exists the way we knew it. Not for them, but in us. In memory that was built with time and effort and attention they will never match, no matter how long they stay. They can have the surface of it. They can have their version of it. But they will never know what it means to belong to it.
I am done fighting people who mistake control for connection. I’m walking away with something they can’t touch, something they will never realize they’re missing.
Diane Grossi grew up and lived on the former M Ranch until last month.