This is Heaven

       Behind him, and only a short saunter's distance, his family sat around a fire ring in the grass.  A fire was burning moderately and perfect coals were gathered away from the flame.  He could hear his wife in the way the patio's screen door moved as she entered and exited the small ranching house they'd inherited from his father shortly after their kids had moved out.  His and his first wife's son, and his son's four year old daughter, were roasting marshmallows.  He heard his wife's deep maternal tone suggesting chocolate and graham cracker's.  He imagined his son's daughter, bundled against the cold, the look of her hooded face as the sun set, adding to her glow in conjunction with the fire and the thought of smores.  He listened to hear the voice of his son.  He wanted to hear him when he spoke to his glowing girl.
       The land he looked at as he sat at the fences edge, at the last white picketed post before the hill sloped downward creating a natural barrier, was the land his heart had always wanted.  At the foot of the hill there was a canal, low for it being Autumn, with a bridge he'd built with his father that crossed to a strip of land lying between the canal and a fast moving river, rocky and glimmering.  Across the river were pastures extending until the land sloped and the slope plateaued, and behind the first plateau was another narrow string of pastures until they met a more mountainous plateau, acting as one edge of the small town's valley.  Sparsed across the graying yellow grass of the lower steppe were groves of three or five coloring quaking aspen stood like golden tips of spears gathered upright on the earth.  Also, there were the occasional groups of cattle and old wooden structures, colorless and without walls, used to protect bails of hay stacked beneath.  Running the river and the canals edge were