Earth
twenty-one years before
You’re in the right story, I whisper, but I don’t think you hear.
It’s cold as the days fall into midwinter.
Frost encrusts my fingertips, icicles cling to my hair.
I tell you of Willie Matthews and Sally Ann Thunder Ann Whirlwind, of Prairie Rose and the everywoman homesteader.
I rove my memory backward twenty years into the thick of the Wild West, the age of thundering cattle drives.
The terrain you live on is the same landscape as Old Chisholm Trail, once the hunting lands of the Cherokee, and further back in time, the homeland of the Wichita people.
I squint and see much that is forgotten.
Women lost in the wind swarm of history, stories never told.
Willie Matthews dashes alongside a gorge, the fringes of her chaps snapping, summer heat fizzling across her shoulders.
The range gleams red, the horizon endless.
She carves between the blackjacks on her mustang, steering the longhorns downhill, the clamor of ten thousand hooves echoing about the lowland.
A tapestry of ancestry, a community knit through the landscape of time.
But Willie Matthews becomes fable. Sally Ann is forgotten. Their voices diminish to a haunting, just myth whispered on the wind. Minnie, do you see? In isolation, one slips toward oblivion.
Seasons pass, years rush on by.
Time, unstable on the prairie. As the century turns, the press of advancement is heavy, wheels clawing at my bones, metal automobiles scraping across my veins, smoke puffing toward the sky.
Women fought for and won rights, a war spread across my entire body, times changed.
Once, my prairie was quiet. Now, everything moves faster, louder, grander.
My throat congested, my breath tinged with soot.
Alongside Crooked Creek, a woman roams through amber bluestem and, at her garden, kneels against my moist soil.
Her name is Gail. Holding her cloak against her neck, the homesteader presses through the gusts to her porch, tumbleweeds whipping up into the firmament.
These tales of Crooked Creek evolve, just as my body is ever changing, just as stories are rewritten over and again, memories of these women resurface and re-form, until I’m not sure where my own memory slips into myth.
I try to tell you about myself, about this particular patch of rolling hills, but I cannot quite grasp my essence.
I wonder, what does it mean to be something or other?
Which parts of one’s story are truth and which are imagined?
Which parts matter when cobbling together an identity?
I am so tired. I am so many fragments.
Stir about a bit, Minnie. Listen. Knit yourself into this patchwork quilt of memory. And hold on.