Grandma's Prairie

I'm in Eden Prairie Minnesota and the wind is blowing about 20 to 25 knots. It is about 70 degrees and the sun is shining. It's mid afternoon, May second, nineteen eighty one. My left collar ir slapping my ear and the right one is buzzing on my shoulder.

         The trees are hissing. My grandmother is contemplating leaving this earth because she has seen World War I from this same type of sunny day in North Dakota. She mows her yard with an electric lawn mower and she's German. She was here just 130 years after this country was founded.

It's windy and dust fills the sloughs this spring in Petersburg. In May my grandfather died the same year I graduated from high school. He ran the farm and the telephone company for Nelson County. He was always cheerful and raised my mom well and at the same time, it was the only way he knew.

It's still mid afternoon; the memories I have of North Dakota are good. I had fun because the mornings lasted longer up there and I wanted my life to last longer because I like my Aunt Lorraine so much. She used to chase me around the  house and tickle me until I cried from laughing. I think it was the normal response from my tweaking her on the ass when she washed her hair in the kitchen sink.

My days were focused on seeing the people who would give me attention and laughter and my days still are focused on my favorite people. I still seek out the sun, the beaches, the wind like on the side of the road in the mid-afternoon wind.

Time has stood still; no one else would be here on this hill and field with me. It's weird, but I love to write. All is well with God and myself. I don’t' have to have the crowds. I can take them when they come and I'll love it as every moment I'm alone, I'm preparing for them with writing and meeting new people. I am doing my life the best way.

Grandma has done her life well too. She raised five kids and they all like to laugh. She played the church organ for years and still plays.  World War II came and went. I visited her many times afterwards and I watched the sunset and talked to my Dad, the guy who had to meet my Mom's parents one day forty years ago just before the war on a hot day. He wasn't nervous, he knew for sure what he knew at the time and he knew she was extraordinary.

The corn grew up and the grain trucks fed the nation in the summer of '42. A lot of land had not even been seen by man, much less settled on and farmed. But Grandma Flem was there - settled in the bright summer morning spending the specific time God created for her in joy. She was happy and got such a kick out of her kids.

The South horizon is dusty. It's still mid-afternoon. The wind howls in the power lines just above me. I can sit here and catch a glimpse of Mom and Dad on the English Coulee in the summer of '42 at the University of North Dakota. I wasn't born yet and they didn't know each other very well then, not like they do now.

I don't think Grandma much cares if she ever gets to Maui in this life. Mom and Dad live together over there every winter. But the English Coulee still flows in the spring. Lovers find each other and drink beer and plan a future, but they don't fly airforce training planes in Akron, Ohio; no, they don't carry water from the barns, they don't climb on rusting Model T's like Mom and Dad did.

The wind drapes the grass to the North. Each shimmering blade looks like my Grandfather's hair in the wind when he looked over his crops and called on what he knew to be his God, the one he assumed giveth and taketh away. But he didn't know and made it anyway - almost. He quit early and croaked of diabetes. His hair didn't shimmer in the wind that bright spring day before the summer of '64. His heart got him early because God was expecting to meet him on the South forty in the spring of '84. The wind would be blowing, a tractor purring in the distance raising dust for the frame of the picture I've always loved - a man doing the work he loves for God and the woman he loves.

And they're almost gone now. Grandma contemplates leaving this earth and the wind is blowing about 20 to 25 knots.