August 15, 1934 — Willow Grove, Nebraska

We were playing tic tac toe in the dust on the floor when Pop came rushing in through the screen door.

“Looks like it’s blowing up a big one,” he said, “better get the house buttoned up.”

He went out to the pitcher pump and filled a couple of buckets, then closed the inner door, tight, as he returned. Meanwhile, Mom and I rushed around slamming all the windows shut. We hurried to the the linen closet and grabbed armloads of sheets, then the three of us dropped them, one by one, into the buckets of water.  We wrung them out, and hung them over the windows, just as we began to hear the wind howling around the southwest corner.

With the house closed as tight as we could make it, we tried to find something to do besides remember the storms of the past seven months. They’d started the previous winter—caught Mom and Pop out playing cards with Aunt Edna and Uncle Carl. They didn’t get home until the next morning. Connor was still home then, and we buttoned up the house as best we could and went to bed in piles of dust.

After almost eighteen months we’d refined our methods, but we still suffered. It didn’t take long for us to feel stifled this time either. We’d blow our noses, and our handkerchiefs would be black. In minutes, we started sweating. Rivulets of sweat poured down our faces and mixed with the dirt. When we wiped it off, we just smeared our faces muddy. Pop always shaved first thing in the morning, and dirt adhered, particularly, to Pop’s whiskers. It had us all scratching frantically around our necks.

We sat around in the dark, or near dark. Coughing, Mom lit a kerosene lamp. The house smelled like dust. It tasted like dust. Everything we’d touched for weeks—months—had felt gritty. During these storms, we moved through a fog of fine silty loam. Pop said that was his cropland blowing away. “At least,” he said, “after this is over, we can scoop some of it back out of the house.” Meanwhile, it’s almost all we could see, even inside.

“I closed up the barn as tight as I could, and the chicken house,” Pop said, “Made sure the hens had water.”

“It’s awful out there,” Mom said, “I feel so sorry for all the animals. Not even just our animals. Think of all the rabbits and coyotes and quail.”

“I’m still hearing that great horned owl,” I said. “I think there’s a pair of them. I think I’m hearing more than one.”

“I hope they’ve got a place to get out . . .” Mom couldn’t finish her thought because she started coughing, hard. When she recovered, she said that she’d seen a covey of quail in the brush just north of the brooder house—by the big mulberry tree. “Maybe they’ll be all right if the dust doesn’t just drift over the top of them. They’re so little.”

Pop cleared his throat and blew his nose. “Them pheasants they stocked back when seem to be doing okay in the draw down by where the creek used to be. Maybe I’ll go out when this storm is over and shoot a couple so we can have some meat with our beans.”

I sneezed a few times. “I’ve been meaning to bring that up,” I said. “Next year, can we plant something besides beans? Anything. Lettuce. Tomatoes. Anything.”

“I don’t know if anything besides beans can take the wind. It just dries everything up to shoe leather,” Pop said.

“Maybe if I bucket water to them every morning and evening?”

Mom started getting excited by the prospect, too. “Maybe some peas in March or April. Before it gets blistering hot.”

“Root crops,” I said. “Beets or carrots.”

“That’s a lot of water,” Pop said. “I wouldn’t try lettuce, though. One afternoon of wind, even with the roots saturated, would dry it to parchment.”

“But some of the other vegetables?”

“You can try, I suppose,” Mom said. “I’ve saved seeds.” She paused for a moment. “We have a good well and . . .” she started coughing again. “. . . and it doesn’t seem to ever go dry,” she said when she’d recovered.

As soon as we’d begun hearing wind, Mom had started coughing. That cough had me worried. I know it had worried Connor, too, before he took off for California. He told me he hated to leave with Mom getting along so poorly, but, if he left, there would be one less mouth to feed. He thought maybe he could find a job somewhere and send money home. I missed my brother like crazy, though. We were born only eighteen months apart, and we’d been almost like twins. We’d got a couple of letters from him when he first got to Uncle Lawrence and Aunt Emily’s place near El Cajon. He’d found some work in the hayfields there, but California was in a drought, too.

“What do you think Connor’s doing now,” I wondered aloud. “It doesn’t sound like they’re having dust storms in California.”

“Well,” Pop said, “he’s apparently left Uncle Lawrence’s place. He’s applied for that new program Roosevelt got passed. It’ll be a while before it gets started, but if he can get in, he’ll have work and a paycheck for a couple of years. Maybe this will be over by then.”

“Oh, I hope so,” Mom said.

It’s kind of hard to talk when you get dirt in your mouth every time you open it, so Mom and I tried to go back to our tic tac toe, just to distract ourselves. But it was too dark to see our grid and the dust sifting in covered it up almost as fast as we could start a game. Before long, we were all sitting on our bent-backed kitchen chairs, leaning on the table, sweating and panting, like a family of beached whales. And then Mom started coughing.

She coughed and gagged until I thought she’d strangle. The phlegm she coughed up was foamy and black. Pop wanted to take her to the doctor, but the car had already filled up with dirt during that first storm in February more than a year before. He’d had to have it towed into town to clean the engine before he could get it started again. After that, it stayed in the garage during dusters. Pop wasn’t sure Mom could take the trip to town anyway, and if the car stalled on the way, she would hardly have a chance.

So, I sat there, fidgeting, waiting for the wind to stop, listening to Mom coughing, and Pop trying to help her. Once just for something to do, I went upstairs, but it was worse up there. Our beds all looked like they’d been dragged behind the plow. My footsteps sounded like grinding sand into the once-polished yellow pine floors. The light was brighter up there, but all I could see was piles of dirt at the bottom of each window where it dropped off the sheet.

We knew the wind would probably blow all night and, even when the sun went down, we would get no relief from the heat or the dust. We sure couldn’t open a window. Sometime during the night, we went upstairs to bed. We didn’t bother to undress, we just shook some of the dust out of the blanket on top of the bed, not too vigorously, and laid on top of it, wishing we could just take a bath—even a little “spit bath.” Instead, we just endured.