Below is a response to this week’s Carrot Ranch Literary Community blog challenge. Here in 99 words, no more, no less, is a “flash story” about mud.
When my sister and I were young, we spent every day it was fit to be outside investigating the farm our family owned. Spring was best when the seasonal creek ran under the bridge. We waded in warm, squishy almost-liquid. Soft, viscous ooze squeezed between our wriggling toes and little creatures tickled our legs. Mom gave us a flour sifter to filter whatever lurked hidden in that murky fluid. Imagine our delight when the sieve came out swarming with tiny creatures. We put them in jars where we could see them and watch them grow into toads.
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.
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.
I can’t seem to help myself. Maybe this happens to you. You go outside in the morning to water some special plants. You’ll only be out there for 10 minutes, 15 at the maximum. Then, two hours later, you get back in the house—sunburned maybe—but you’ve probably done it so many times your skin has already turned dark. Sunscreen? You’re only going to be outside 10 minutes and the sun hasn’t even cleared the neighbor’s treetops.
If that sounds at all familiar, you can probably picture my morning. Among the things I’m passionate about is prairie. I live in town now, not altogether willingly, but I grew up on a farm in mid-grass prairie. So I’ve been gradually turning my large lot back into short-grass species. I love that I don’t have to water except maybe once or twice a season—and mow not at all. That means I can allow wildflowers to grow . . .
See. That’s how I end up outside for hours rather than minutes. I distract myself.
Prairie Coneflower
Back to this morning, it proceeded like many others. I watered the new grass I planted last month. Buffalo and gramma grasses are doing well. Then I popped around to the other side of the shed to pick raspberries. There were some woody canes from last year’s crop growing in the “patch,” so I stepped inside the shed for my pruners and leather gloves to cut a few of them. Well, I kept cutting. When I’d finally cut all the canes and picked all the raspberries, I noticed I had some snow peas ready to pick. So I picked them.
That took me through the shed to the vegetable garden where I noticed I had some suckers growing on my pumpkin vines. I still had the pruners with me, so I cut them. And then, of course, I had to check the tomatoes. I have a calcium deficiency in my soil here and I remembered I hadn’t given the ‘maties their calcium nitrate, so I went back in the shed and got the calcium to spread. That reminded me I needed to spread some micro-nutrients to all the food plants. I went back in the shed and got the pellets to scatter.
I have a piece of roof gutter in the garden. It has holes drilled in it and end caps. Since I have an artesian well in the middle of my basement, I pump water for months. I’ve routed it to the garden where I run it into the gutter to control the flow onto my veggies. Well, I had to move the apparatus to a new location. Then the morning was pretty well gone.
Does this ever happen to you? Do you have a distraction story?
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