A narrow sandy road, steep ditches, rolling over hills,
bottomless in the rain, a wheel swallowing mud, almost
too narrow for passing when dry, and ruts that are guides
in the wind and rain, led to a house on one of the endless
western hills of the High Plains.
That house, clapboard, whitewashed, two story, in the middle
of detached buildings, an old rusty red barn, and a small clubhouse
with a well-kept yard of miscellaneous weeds and prairie grass.
That home where a thin, auburn haired, country girl with thin lips, freckles, blue eyes, and paradoxically pale skin, lived and burned
atop a tractor in the fields working with her father, became my bride
after moving to a town far away from where her heart was planted.
In a way, she was torn between two loves, her childhood home and
our life together. The sadness in her eyes never left. Yet she always had a smile for me. And we visited her past as often as my time allowed.
When the old home died and her parents moved on to unworldly fields, I made it up to her with long rolling roads and empty fields filled with nature and patient hours along lake beaches and sunsets.
But she never went home again. Former lives fade away.
She made the best of it, sadness in the eyes, and smiles for me.