From Part I, A Rare Find (Thanksgiving in Kansas)
“No plate for Dad. I looked over at his college graduation picture on the buffet. His dark eyes, under heavy brows and set in a young, smooth face, stared fixedly into a future now spent. ‘Just look at that handsome rascal,’ my mother liked to say, as she gazed at the picture. ‘Is there any wonder why I married him?’”
A Familiar Clanging Noise
From The Ogallala Road, Part I, “A Rare Find”
“I heard a familiar clanging noise. I looked up to see a white pickup coming down the hill pulling an empty metal stock trailer behind it. Great! I thought. Now I’ve got to deal with some yokel out here in the middle of nowhere.
“I tried to warn you,” my mother said in my head, where she’d resided for as long as I could remember.
Ogallala Aquifer Spring on Little Beaver
“I found the pond lying still and innocent, a receptive, vulnerable reflection of the sky. This wasn’t rainwater. It hadn’t rained in weeks. My brother Bruce had … told me he was worried that the ground would be too parched to plant dry-land winter wheat this September. No. This pond was what the pioneers and early settlers had called ‘live water.’ It had found the surface by itself without the aid of rain,
The Sound of Water in My Childhood
“The windmill’s fan whirred and the well rods creaked up and down, making a tinny, lonely sound. Water spurted from the pipe into a tank. These, not the growl of irrigation engines, were the sounds I equated with water while growing up. The rhythm was systolic, soothing.”
High on a Knoll
From Part I, A Rare Find
“My grandfather Carlson had built the house high on a knoll. With stately trees and a huge red barn beside it, it had been a landmark, visible for miles around. Now it was as if all evidence of our existence had been erased by the wandlike arm of the center-pivot irrigation sprinkler I’d parked beside.”
