Settler Woman
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008
I can’t see her face from here, but in the blazing August heat, she has her dog on a leash and has taken him two steps outside her front door, the full distance of their drip. Bent branches form the perfect wreath hangs on the front entryway, giving a beauty to the air-conditioned haven inside and place from which she’ll watch her terrier do his business.
She has a cordless phone up to one ear and the sun shines through her coarse golden hair, the dark roots still prevalent 100 yards or so away. Her face might be washed out, but she seems afraid to step too far away from the shadows cast by the overhangs and the eaves behind her.
The people who settled this state endured far worse without the benefit of today’s medicine and modern accomodations, obviously, such as the air-conditioner that spins its fan blade non-stop in a low hum that permeates the back yards. What a sad example this woman would be for those settlers whose hard days’ work was expended for survival, on these plains the toils going mostly to meals at break of, middle and end of day, not for ploeasure, not for relaxation.
This woman who has all the time in the world comparatively, who could climb in, turn a key and motor off on four wheels completely protected by the elements and drive on paved roads thousands of miles to another state or another country if she were so inclined and yet doesn’t due to her own commitments and preoccupations. I would call it a lack of dreaming really.
Bonneted settler women, homemakers with strong backs and unbreakable wills that stare back emotionless from so many sepiatoned photographs, who had to put the cooking and cleaning aside to help their husbands (along with their children) unstick rutted wagon wheels and farm equipment, who could travel barely into the double-digited miles with the means of travel available to them, and everyone’s health constantly in question. The well-being of their children never solidified. Curable as it might be, polio was a constant killer as was severe cases of the flu.
When she stepped out to walk her dog, I doubt she thought a neighbor would be moved to write these things about her, but I have, and the fact that she’s faceless and distant makes it easier to have the courage and the audacity to judge.
