for Jerry
The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God…
Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too.
—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
You see it wrong, these farmers, mild-mannered as a newborn calf yet strong as its parents pulling weights and weighing displeasure in a voting booth or winnowing poems on the hoof in a writing workshop.
You see it wrong, these fields, giving birth to bottomlands of black humus beat fist-hard by iron, and diesel smoke, yield after yield. And flats squeezed between breasts of green.
Memories of Fred the farmer who hired my brothers to detassel corn but who when alone with me in the living room of our home one day asked for a kiss. “Just one kiss,” he said. I was a young teen, and I refused to ever be alone with him again.
Memories of another man, a friend of the family who likewise asked for a kiss when I was eighteen and had finished high school finals. “Here’s a drink to mark your achievement,” he said when I agreed to visit his home during lunch hour to celebrate. “Now how about a kiss?”
Phantoms to remind me in the hush, faces long gone from my periphery, but there, nonetheless.
The farmer has it easy busting butt and sod, first light to dusk, seven days a week, flipping switches on milking machines and wrestling ten-ton tractors with air-conditioned cabs.
The farmer has it easy—hasn’t he inherited those thousand acres and thousand head of cattle, four generations removed? Sure he did, along with the rusty old equipment lining his pastures and a debt load that would choke a John Deere 560 round baler.
Even the farmer’s wife has it easy, especially in the matter of implements in fields left to catch unsuspecting children in their moving mechanisms, and then to plan a funeral.
When I was thirty-five I found it convenient to heft a three-year-old alongside my impatience rather than wait for him to catch up, and lift couches and desks in my “rearrange the furniture” fetish, and generally act like a weightlifter with Wolverine’s adamantium spine. Surgery. Two years later I obviously hadn’t learned the lesson yet. Surgery again.
These days I look at a fifty-pound bag of poultry feed and curse it. I’ve learned to drag bags, ignore patio blocks, or enlist help, and sit on a couch for days at a time when my memory has lapsed where it concerns what I can and can’t do, or should and shouldn’t do, all while an alfresco world chimes away outside my doors.
Branches bow in the late afternoon breeze, water glints and curls. The old railroad bridge sweeps long in its history, and the bronzed beams deck the wide winding river. It’s the Cedar, so called because of the red cedars that line the shores.
A sandy peninsula holds driftwood and a few scrubby shrubs. Trees in their mid-fall turning have been dusted with the talc of leaf-abscission; shades of browns rim the riverside here and there. Soybean fields are being harvested this time of year, and the orange and black beetles, Harmonia axyridis, proliferate. Their food source is off to market.
The black and gray and romping blue of this living water expand my horizons along with my hopes. The only death here is the trunk directly across from me and the trunks further down that lose their footing against the constant running of a slowish river on an earth filled with such.
The sky is always the same: there, see? Blue with white appointments blown like the river, calmly along. A jet’s pencil-thin contrail cannot compete, but is tawdry and weak in comparison. This is not unusual. Nature is the great artist, and humankind plagiarizes the master.
Above the river and fields the blazing sun begins to wane. It streaks through trees, aflame and vicious, yet softening, softer and softer as the moments pass. Setting suns are a dime a dozen, and each a divine fingerprint smudged across heaven’s expanse.
Let’s not tell anyone we expect fresh words in the midst of such views, for Place stands strong in the annals of Time. No kings here but Mother Nature, and lush days, generative, virginal, are each new in this space.
–
German-born Chila Woychik is aging. Her many published works bring her joy, but her heart now lies with her cozy mystery series, The Maddie Hill Mysteries. When not doing all the things, she loves driving her rural Iowa, watching the sun rise over miles of green. She edits the Eastern Iowa Review.