Month: February 2019

Clear

  1. I  run through my preflight checklist.
  2. Leaning out the window, I yell “clear” and start the engine, remembering for an instant the scene in MASH, the movie, when a prop runs through one of the characters—I don’t remember who.
  3. I head down the taxiway, still adjusting to steering with my feet.
  4. Since I’m rated as a VFR (visual flight reference, rather than instrument) pilot, I lift off into clear blue skies.
  5. I’m flying Nebraska skies so I turn my nose into a steep “crab angle” against a stiff cross wind.
  6. Oh, how I miss those clear, blue skies, even when I had to fight the wind.
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Categories: Non-fiction

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A quote from one of my favorites

I love Pat Conroy for many things, but one of the most important is his description of his native South Carolina country. Here’s a sentence from Beach Music that makes me shiver: Because even beauty has its limits, I shall always remain a prisoner of war to this fragrant, voluptuous latitude of the planet, fringed with palms and green marshes running beside rivers for thirty miles at a time, and emptying out on low-lying archipelagoes running north and south along the coast before the Atlantic’s grand appearance.

Or how about this one: As we looked out to the sea a wind lifted off the crests of the incoming waves creating a dialogue between the palms and bearing an iodine taste.

Or this description of a resident: Her senses blazed like five Lenten candles when she stared out into that portion of the ocean that extended beyond their land.

Categories: Fiction

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Perched on the Highest Hill

  1. Billy Arnold wanted to see whatever marauders, land grabbers, and horse thieves came to his neighborhood before they arrived, so he perched on top of the highest hill he could find, building his soddy right at its peak.
  2. He could see ten miles in any direction from his hill, including his three brothers’ and his dad’s homes.
  3. He felt safe.
  4. Day by day, wind ripped at his clothes, filled his eyes with dust, and dried out his crops, but still he prospered.
  5. His wife couldn’t wait for a real, frame house and Billy wanted corrals and barns and granaries—so he borrowed money.
  6. Instead of land grabbers, he lost his place to bankers, BUT he homesteaded a new place in Oklahoma and struck oil.
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Categories: Fiction

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No Party for Me

I must have been five, maybe six. My classmate had a Valentine’s Day party. She distributed invitations at school and my parents decided I should go. I had spent almost no time with children before starting kindergarten. Then I spent the year bringing home all the childhood diseases—measles, mumps, chicken pox, measles, and finally, bronchial pneumonia. I needed socialization. Dad took me to the house, but the girl’s parents wouldn’t let me in. I don’t remember my rejection, but my dad never forgot. I only know because I asked Mom years later why Dad so hated that family.

Categories: Communities

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Sea Mist

The waves looked soft as he peered through tropical rain. The island was only a ragged outline. Crawling down the rope netting into a landing craft, he watched it grow closer, more distinct. It would be his first combat. Would he stand up to it? Was he brave as he thought—hoped?  Somehow he knew he would survive, but what about the others? Weeks earlier, in the middle of the ocean, he’d looked through a light mist silvered by soft by moonlight and realized survival wasn’t enough.  Seeing the guy next to him fall—that’s what made him sick.

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Categories: Fiction

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