A Heart in the Dust

A Heart in the Dust

The sign at the edge of town says that the population is 100, give or take a few. The houses are tidy, most with flat lawns, adorned with small beds of iris and weeds, an occasional vegetable garden, honeysuckle vines out of control covering old hedges and old fashioned lilacs whose scents fill the late spring air with sweetness. The gravel road alerts us to anyone approaching by foot or vehicle and I love the sound. I can hear a dog barking far in the distance and every few minutes from 6 am till midnight, the trains come past. The horn signal is long, long, short, long with pulses of rapid clanging from the distant crossings in the background. The trains pass, powerful, hauling coal, grain, oil and stacked containers.

The small farm cottage, built in 1910 greets us like a jewel on the prairie, a welcome surprise even though not a new one to us. There is a wind chime that sings in the Kansas breeze, a bluebird house with birds nesting and more goldfinches than I bother to count. We closed the rusty fence gate behind us, walked across the yard to the kitchen door and stepped inside. And for one brief moment, it felt and looked like a Mother’s Day from my childhood, at my grandmother’s house. “Don’t bother to cook lunch for us for we’ll eat something on the way,” my mother would write. But on our arrival, every time, there it would be. Flowers on the table, a pie or cake, plates and forks. Full of love, ready and waiting. Such was the case this week, there they were, a homemade rhubarb pie and a vase of purple irises from the garden.

We had driven for a couple of hours, past a long abandoned house with Christmas lights still strung around the door from a time when someone probably believed they could restore the home, and then on the open range only encountering 2 other vehicles; one, a fancy pickup truck with a seemingly friendly young rancher who stretched his arm high out the window for a hearty wave as if to say, “Hey! How about this great truck!” The other was a small, old and faded blue Ford, driven by an older man looking weathered and worn by the years who gave the classic greeting of lifting his index finger and chin slightly upward without moving his wrist which was draped over the top of the steering wheel. The dust was thick and I turned to look as he passed and could barely make out the license plate, but noted that someone had used the dusty pallet to draw a small heart on the back window.

There is a library 20 miles away with wifi. There is none at the cottage, but plenty of movies, games and books, among them an edition of Wendell Berry poems. A line from one of them found me right away; *I am wholly willing to be here between the bright silent thousands of stars and the light of the grass pouring from the ground. *This, from On the Hill Late at Night.

While the amenities are nice, they seem wholly unnecessary given the stars, the spring grasslands, rhubarb pie and a heart in the dust.