Word Painting (Frontporch)
Monday, August 4th, 2008
The paint flakes on the white-washed railing around the frontporch. A pair of flower baskets loaded with dirt and geraniums overflow – purple petals lie scattered on the slatted floor in the spaces between boards. Sometime in the night or perhaps the lazy day a spider has woven a web across the porch swing and as I look out on the parched August grass, I wonder if there is any view more American than this one.
Down the street past the stop sign’ a farmer with a potbelly unloads a tractor from the trailer he pulled behing the giant extended-cab truck parked in the street. He starts the engine, which pierces the soft afternoon rustling of leaves by the steady wind and drives it up the slanted driveway to an opwn garage door. He leaves it there and climbs back in the pick-up to the sounds of American flags beating in the wind.
His Ford 4×4 has a hemi engine in it, which makes it sound as though it were as strong as a diesel, and with its poor gas mileage, he takes it back to the farm and the endlessness of Kansas farm fields that are left unprotected and unshadowed to burn in the direct sunlight today.
My own body has been heated to a deep tan. My arms and chest are mocha-colored, far from the ivory white of last spring. I’ve completed my chores for the day and sit in relaxed judgment of the outside world now. Of all the 50 states in the union, I doubt the world expects anyone or anything beautiful to come out of these farm fields and rolling prairies, but on days when the well seems especially filled with words and the right language, I find that the world, as beautiful and miserable as it can be … can be wrong.
I imagine the people behind the closed screendoors – inside these air-conditioned palaces are sitting down to eat apple pie for dinner tonight on tables ripe with freshly picked beets and string beans grown in backyards or picked up at roadside vegetable stands. Kansas, long fogotten in the eyes of the nation, a red state deep-dyed in its support of the elephant party, dependable for the way it votes and blind to the candidates as long as they are Republican.
Hot in the summer, as dry as a desert but more humid thanks to thw rivers that cut wide swaths throught the northeast, deep and brown. Kansas, where some men still where denim overalls, John Deer caps and rise in the early morning hours before anyone else to carry lanterns into dark fields, milk cows they are completley carless about and spend Saturday mornings in greasey fork-and-spoon cafes where people are still allowed to smoke. And all in all, they know what an important role they play in food supply.
I can smell faintly the backyard barbecue grills firing up as the dinner hour approaches. The streets are empty of children and men tuning motorcycles, and ladies waterinf plants. Cars swish by leaving a wake in this thick and humid afternoon and for a split second, I remember myself as a child playing at the base of a cigar tree ibn my grandmother’s back yard. Kansas, timeless and not forgotten, at least not for me.
