This post comes from a Carrot Ranch Literary Community 99-word challenge. The challenge word/phrase this time was “rock star.“You should try it.
She starred with big band orchestras in cities along the Eastern Seaboard and around the Great Lakes. Then she married a Nebraska farmer. He moved her to a stark little square house with a hip roof in the middle of a howling wilderness. In less than three years, she ran back to city lights—nightclubs—singing all night. .
But she came back. She adapted to the prairie’s silences and its screaming winds, the outhouse, the washboard, and the tyranny of crops and livestock. She became a better farm wife than many women who grew up on farms—she rocked.
This is a few years later (about 1950) and some of Daddy’s trees had started to grow. The volunteer mulberry tree (bottom right) still stands.
Sundays he
would wander his 480 acres, checking its health. He might walk the fences with
a bucket of staples, fencing pliers, and a fence stretcher, or hitch the horses
to a wagon with a roll of barbed wire and the other fencing materials. Later, I can remember him going out with the
tractor and wagon on the same errand.
On Sundays, George also played baseball sometimes. His tight community was also a kind of church.
As he drove
around the fenceline, he could hear the rhythm of the tractor engine and the
jingle of stapes and tools bouncing in the wagon bed. When he found a breach,
he’d turn off the tractor so he could hear grass wind, the smooth legato call
of a meadowlark, and the gentle clank of the windmill pumping water at the top
of the hill. A breeze might ruffle his hair and sing in the tightly-strung
fence wires. He might be semi-conscious of pinpricks of wildflowers, blue
verbena like tiny candelabras, purple poppy mallow hiding in the grass, and the
persistent sunflowers. He probably carried a machete to cut them when he found
them, releasing their strong, acrid scent. He would smell cool sweet-grass crushed
by the tractor wheels, like sliced cucumbers.
He could see
the patterns of his mind on the land—terraces and waterways to hold the soil
against tillage; a passage for cattle, from pasture to pasture, under the
bridge; dams across the seasonal creeks to hold spring run-off; habitat areas
set aside for wild creatures; osage orange posts and barbed wire confining
cattle to the least productive acres.
I removed the
last hedge post in 1992, remembering that it had been there for three
generations—the very last of a carload he’d bought when he moved his family
onto the home quarter in 1926. I imagined him digging the hole that post sat in
for seventy years—by hand through concrete-hard yellow clay.
I found
something spiritual about digging out the remains of that broken post,
something composed of family and land and abiding mystery.
This post resulted from another GirlieOnTheEdge six-sentence, flash-fiction challenge. The challenge word this time was pad and the first thing that came to mind was a happy, smiling dog padding around.You can check out the challenge, maybe write your own six sentences, here.
1. Freckles crept, nose near the ground, rump high, legs ready in case she needed to sprint, eyes riveted on an old ewe. 2. The ewe stomped once, twice, and looked over her shoulder. 3. The rest of the flock stood motionless behind her, watching. 4. Freckles crept another few inches and the ewe raised her head, turned, and dashed through middle of the flock, into the gate. 5. The rest of the sheep scurried in behind her. 6. Freckles padded over to her shepherd, smiling, head high, tail wagging, for a gentle pat on the head—job well done. Check this pinterest image: https://pin.it/zbfmzju4d4g2p4 Or here is an audio file.
This is another of my six-sentence flash-fiction contributions.
I was never a bullhauler, but this is the only image I’ve got.
I make my living in a bubble.
Behind a tough sheet of Plexiglas I watch fathers in New Jersey going to work before dawn, families vacationing in Arizona, mothers loading groceries in Chicago.
I drive a big truck—garment loads from New York and produce from California, back and forth from coast to coast.
The first time I saw an elephant blocking the road, I pulled over and sloshed through the roadside trees in the rain, trying to figure out where it had gone when I looked away.
When it appeared for the third time, I realized I had issues I had to resolve.
Dispatch threatened to reassigned my lovely truck when I decided to take some leave, but it was my life and I needed to sort it out.
Here is another Carrot Ranch 99-word prompt story. The word is Chisel.
Interesting how the light turns the steel blue.
I have a set of chisels. They are very sharp. I use them occasionally, but I don’t have the skill or training to use them elegantly. When I use tools, though, I think of my mother who could look at mechanical devices and understand them. She had the patience and natural talent to use tools effectively, but in the mid-Twentieth Century, she was never allowed the pride she deserved in her skills. My dad’s embarrassment (because the man’s supposed to fix things) gave him no ability to appreciate my mom’s solutions to farm problems—in the house and out.
The winter of ’88 started late with an ice storm that took out tens of miles of power lines, snapping poles at the ground. Later, snow filled the windbreak between the corral, with its water lines, and the horses. My husband and sons dug a tunnel through the windbreak, but bits of drift persisted into spring. I was working the garden when my baby wandered off. I followed his cries and found him sitting in a puddle of snow melt. Normally, Ben didn’t like his bath, but that day he was really pleased to have a dunking in warm water.
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.
I head down the taxiway, still adjusting to
steering with my feet.
Since I’m rated as a VFR (visual flight
reference, rather than instrument) pilot, I lift off into clear blue skies.
I’m flying Nebraska skies so I turn my nose into
a steep “crab angle” against a stiff cross wind.
Oh, how I miss those clear, blue skies, even
when I had to fight the wind.
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.
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.
He could see ten miles in any direction from his
hill, including his three brothers’ and his dad’s homes.
He felt safe.
Day by day, wind ripped at his clothes, filled
his eyes with dust, and dried out his crops, but still he prospered.
His wife couldn’t wait for a real, frame house
and Billy wanted corrals and barns and granaries—so he borrowed money.
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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