Chapter Forty-Seven Nash, Oklahoma—April 4, 1946
Chapter Forty-Seven
fifty-two years later
Irose before dawn, pulled aside the lace curtain, and looked through the windowpanes at my land.
The night’s rainstorm dappled the glass, blurring the dimly lit golden expanse.
I swung my morning robe round my shoulders and straightened the quilt over Stot’s feet, the muted rose and clover squares wrapped round his ankles.
I strode through the screen door, scooting the salt crystal over as a doorstop, then walked through my orchard and the gardens I’d planted with my children after the dust bowl, past the cedar bench Stot had carved for our fiftieth anniversary, beyond the barn and into the wild grasses of my prairie.
I stood with the winds lashing my skirts about my ankles, the air filled with dew, and waited for sunrise.
The sun broke over the horizon, golden light slashing through the blackjacks, the navy sky weakening to mulberry. I bent and touched the soil, murmured good morning to the earth, to all the sisters who’d walked these grasses stretching back before history.
Deep, below the surface, a pulse responded along my feet.
My stories are endless, endless. All those who told tales said humanity, with their uncontrollable hunger, would devour the earth.
But they didn’t know the earth as I did—she wasn’t one to surrender.
I stood and turned homeward. Time to work.
On the morrow, Magnolia was driving down for a visit.
While today, my daughter Gail and my grandchildren were coming over from their homestead on the other side of the wildwood.
And Verla, she always wanted to sit with me below the orange trees and talk of flowers.
My life began again with this land. I’d come to Oklahoma broken and angry, plagued by regret and chased by memories.
I’d fought the dust and the wind, the turmoil and the fires, and I had emerged anew.
I tell my daughters and my granddaughters of my adventure into the great unknown—of the epic race and of those early days, and I hope they tell their daughters and their granddaughters, but mostly I tell the story to remind myself.
Memory is such a thin, shifting thing. The memories of our ancestors a haze that bleeds—our stories and our pains stretch past our lives and into the next.
And so I tell my story so they will remember. I tell my story so I remember. And what I remember? The land returned me to myself.
The land was the story. The land was always the story.
Settle on in, she has many tales to tell.