Fires and Fights and the Northern Lights

We're planning our vacation in July, and it's got me remembering all of the amazing times I've been with my cousins in life, and how there's some magical hold about those neglected homelands in the prairies where my dad and his family grew up. I don't know if it's the grandparents, or just the landscape, or some perfect combination of memories and hope and love. ANd there's absolutely no way to put it into words. I've been wishing for a long time that I could write a song, but there's just no good way to describe it all.

 Summer Sweetness

We climbed the wind-swept hills

Pushing aside the wild wheat and sunflowers

And we’d come home covered in cockleburs and dirt

Full of sweat and smiles, with tales of glory from the fields

And those abandoned sheds we’d explore

We ran across the prairie like wild animals

Chasing away the grasshoppers with our steps

Between the flour mill, the grain bins and tractors

Snooping in the barn, throwing rocks at old windows

Singing songs about our glory days

Of rusty trucks and barbed wire fences

Of gravel and guns and games that we played

Amidst those farming remnants, we discovered

Pieces of our parents’ childhood

The fence posts broken down, the root cellar and clothesline, the millstones and

old machines on the hill, monuments of business called farming

once crucial tools

Now weary from their years of wear

The saddle, the wagon wheels that first brought them west

The plow, the dried-up pump, the buildings falling down

What secrets untold will die with them, blown away in the prairie wind?

What stories did we miss out on

While we played, too busy to listen, running too fast to slow down

And yet here the stories stay, waiting for another day

Written down in postcards and letters, in photographs and stories

Told through the eyes of these children of the dust, who repeat and wait and remember

They listen to the humming tractors

Or catch the scent of alfalfa on a dry day riding with the windows down

And maybe a wishful feeling washes over them

Like it does over me

Remembering those sweet days of hayloft forts and gopher hunts

The barbeques and fireworks and quiet nights by the fire,

Sleeping under the stars, watching the meteor showers

The walks down the long driveway

The mystical sunsets ablaze in the sky

And laughing together late into the night

The fires and fights, and the northern lights

The vision of it all—badlands, buttes, barbed wire, and all that they represent

This rugged, wilderness wrestling against progress, ancient meeting an old sort of new

The dust, the rust, the trucks,

Those tilted fence posts holding the heartland together

Summers and winters,

the wind and the wheat