Category: Nonfiction
Neorural
It comes too early. The same time each day. A little after dawn. I’d guess half past six on a clock. I wouldn’t know. I don’t bother with clocks here. They don’t mean much. They don’t change the light or the weather or what needs to be done. I hear it before I see it.…
Last Stands of the Rio Grande
“Even in the slightest breeze, you can hear the voice of the cottonwood tree; this we understand is its prayer to the Great Spirit.” –Heȟáka Sápa (Black Elk), Oglala Lakota medicine man Since the end of the last ice age, when humans first ventured into what is now the Middle Rio Grande Valley, Indigenous cultures…
Tending the Mountain
I became a forest steward less than a week after my dad died in his mountain home. Still in shock over his passing – though in his early 90s, he was so robust in mind and spirit it seemed he’d live forever – it would’ve been easy to skip a green cities orientation I’d signed…
Soft Things in Hard Country
Before I had a name for it, I had land. Red dirt and hayfields. Skinned knees and peacock feathers. The sharp smell of cattle, the shimmer of heat above the highway. And over time, I learned that the Oklahoma prairie has its own way of marking you. I grew up knowing the names of things…
Helen(e)
“Honey! It came on time! You’re gonna get to be Beetlejuice for Halloween!” I can’t help but smile as the three-year-old meets his mama with a grin big enough for a grown man. You can’t buy moments like that. Well, I suppose you can for however much that Beetlejuice costume cost. He races across the…
Where It Lands
We leave early, the greydark sky still holding its calm hand over the sun’s burgeoning light, gentle touch of a mother, palm pressed to her child’s forehead. The roads are clear; there is never traffic at this time. A bright earring of moon dangles from the sky’s lobe, a dazzle or two of star studs…
