You can't go home. But if I could,
what would I find? A farm a mile south of Curlew, Iowa, and a quarter mile west. Sunset through the grove of trees west of the farm house. The sound of waterers being slammed shut as the hogs are done using them. Cattle bellering in the night. In the distance, a neighbor's dog barking. I'd be able to sit on the old horse-drawn mower - I had never cut hay with it, I don't remember seeing anyone cut hay with it, I remember it sitting there, rusting, glowing into the air around it. A big white barn. A big chicken house. Corn cribs and steel bins and the smell of oats being harvested, that dust in my nose. The glow of the corn dryer at night, and the roar. The lay of light on the broken corn stalks. In spring, a grey and ragged and dirty ground. The sound of the gun as my father shoots and kills a fox at some great distance as it stands at the entrance to its den where its kits are waiting to nurse. The little foxes in a gunny sack. Whatever became of them?
Are we only memories?
Warmth on my cheek as I step out the door into the sunshine. Half the pond is open. The rest is pretty rotten ice. The grass of our lawn is greening up. Snow is promised for later in the week. There are geese in the bland fields, there is blue sky, a faint haze. Clouds to the north.
I want so much to run away to Iowa, to find that place that was, back in the 1950s when I was growing up. I want to go, yet I must wait patiently. We may have free will, but we are not free!
At the south edge of Ripon, crows in their tree tops, many of them, like a choir loft full of dark joy.
Thank you for this.
Posted by: MB | March 07, 2006 at 10:15 AM
MB, thanks! I need some cheering up in just this regard right now, so it is good to hear a good word.
Posted by: Tom Montag | March 07, 2006 at 10:54 AM