Not Sure I Could Explain

I know you’ve been gone a long while, in fact, several generations have passed since I sat on your knee. Sweat-rimmed engineer’s hat pushed back, exposing your farmer’s tan that ended at your eyebrows. Wisps of white hair, dandelion fluff, around your face. Sky eyes hiding behind that combine-sized nose.

Thought you might want to come for a visit, share your coal mining tales of explosions and second sights. I was too young the first time you told them.

If you come when the day draws back

you could have a wander around.

See the “improvements”. You’ll be happy to know they finally put the bridge over 9 Mile Creek. Yep…

a concrete testament to misplaced ambitions, four lanes wide. The creek ran dry when they dammed up above. Remember how Bess and Tilly pulled the farm truck through, in early spring flood? The snow-melt driving the water wild like two hundred head of spooked cattle

gone mad. We don’t get much snow now, lucky if we get an inch or two every few years.

You could tell Gramma that she wouldn’t be lonely anymore,

out there in the middle of the emptiness going stir-crazy for female conversation. Subdivisions border the edge of the fields; teeming cities of mushroom-cap roofs. She might miss the quiet.
I rebuilt the barn: it was time. Smaller though, the cows and pigs are gone. Bylaws state I can only keep chickens now, at least until 2010. I work in town; the farm’s been reclassified as hobby although I’m sure it never felt that way when you worked your way into stooped shoulders and a herniated disc.

There’s a four lane highway out front of the house. Take your life into your hands to cross: kinda like playing Russian Roulette.

Remember when you taught me how to ride my bike on the only pavement within miles?

Sometimes I see you, your easy gait, pushing the cows along, singing or cursing under your breath – I never knew which. You come in from the back fields at dusk when anything is possible.

by Cathy Yard