The glass beads, strung up on the back porch, rattled and clicked as the wind picked up; the trees, swaying south in the breeze.
Our refrigerator sounds like a bullfrog.
His fur shined like a prism against the sunlight; every hair a rainbow of color.
Where is my cat? He should be able to smell me. These Kansas winds constantly blow, taking my scent to his little wet nose, sniffing the ground in a distant cornfield.
The cellar door is open and a fan is on and blowing somewhere below. The kitchen window is propped open by another fan and the cicada songs penetrate loudly inside the room. The counters are littered with mason jars and coffee mugs. Tomatoes fresh from the garden, and various pots and pans. The oven clock tells me it’s 12:19pm but it feels much earlier than that. We are going to keep working on opening up the cellar from the outside, and do some more digging. An activity that has thoughts of wet dark soil, and toads, and caves, and a wheelbarrow in my head.
The sky splashed over the treetops and gathered in pools at my feet.
Their teeth clicked like bone and steel.
My eyes are brown, reflecting like thermal pools in the sun. My hair, from my body catching up in years, will be white as the snow falling outside my window.
My fingers are numb; covered in cuts and scrapes, raw from working in the garden day in and day out.
The nights here are different. The stars and the prairie grasses brush cheeks. The foxtails and shooting stars dancing and flirting, swaying and twisting together. The only things existing in our world are those illuminated by our headlights, and the rest is black, and part of the sky surrounding us.
It’s harvest time here. Every field is full of giant metal machines, cutting and sorting and munching up and down the rows until the sun is nearly set. Sometimes, the fields at night are full of headlights and the roar of engines.
The streetlights in town hang like black cocoons from their metal posts.
The barn lights dot the horizon for miles, being mistaken for bright stars in constellations.
Standing on the back porch, I see the first snow of the year. The barn roof has become soft and white. The junipers dark green salted with snowflakes. It falls slow but steady, a pattern of frozen water whose patterns are never the same. My blonde hair is frozen with diamonds. The smoothness of the coated yard is broken up by four sets of dog prints, and tire tracks from the truck.
Bees have been following me all day as I wander around in the sunlight.
I collected rocks from the road as we walked. Stopping constantly to stoop and pick up the pink, yellow, white pebbles. By the time we got home, my pockets were plenty weighed down with them. I pulled them all out; the flat circular grey stones stacked like poker chips in my hand, and deposited them next to the soft small ones that looked like a pile of jelly beans on the table. Now, they all sit in a glass jar, waiting for you to come home.
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