Sally Gerard

Love

Love

doesn’t have to be giving up yourself,

like being absorbed into a heap.

Love

doesn’t have to take your personality

like that one unique snowflake shoveled from the walk.

Love

can be two spirits,

flying side-by-side

down paths too dark to go alone and too wondrous not to share.

Love

doesn’t have to be

grappling for control of the remote.

Love

doesn’t have to conflict,

take offense or be treacherous.

Like sharing the best part of each other

with no fear.

Love

is a journey.

I wrote a few weeks ago about this great purple pen I’d found to write in my writer’s notebook at school and how it disappeared from my desk one day. One of my readers took pity on me and sent me a package of these pens in so many colors! Who would have thunk that there could be so many colors?

Pens hold so much possibility. I can write hopes and dreams, sadness and loss. I can lift up or bring down. I can ride my horse anywhere my imagination want to go. I can create my perfect writing studio or little log cabin in a meadow or on a mountainside or in the midst of a snowstorm.

I can meet friends here and relax with a cup of coffee and some lemon meringue pie. We can talk for hours about horses or tractors, or watch a movie with some popcorn and RC Cola. I can go places I’ve never been and meet people who’ll be good friends or some I want to avoid like the plague.

I can linger here in small secret spaces. I can be anyone I want to be. I can create myself as many times as I want. I can be with those I love. There is no one to judge here in these pages. And it all starts with a pen.

Small town part two:

The cafe is the only real business in town: regular hours and folks talking over pie and coffee. The new bank tried to have an internet cafe/coffee shop. I went there once. No one every showed up behind the counter. I guess they were busy on the other side of the pass-through in the bank. I did see two computer stations. I don’t think they leave the bank vault like this, if there is a vault.

There is always talk of revitalizing downtown: a grocery store, recreation center, hotel, maybe a walking and biking path. The drawings come out during community events. They were out at the last pancake breakfast and chili cook-off. We all oohed and aahed over them, again.

My block was paved last summer (2009). Now I can walk to the Mead Cafe without getting my shoes muddy. We also have an upscale communication system. I write a note and walk to my neighbors on the newly paved street and leave it in their milk box. They send their son over to put the response in mine. I try to keep the glass bottles rinsed so it doesn’t smell so bad when you open the lid.

Channel 12 has all the latest town news: basketball fun night at the Mead Middle School Bulldog’s gym; recreation center committee wants “wish-list” submissions; grey table cat lost Tuesday on 4th Street, answers to “Kitty.” We are a small town with dreams and vision and we have our own exit off the interstate: the Mead exit.

I used to live in a small town, before I moved out to the plains. This is my story of a little town called Mead.

It is six-and-a-half blocks. They never completed the west side of 7th Street. You can live on either side of the tracks. The fields stretch out on all sides, interrupted by the interstate and stopped cold by the mountains. The wind can bring the pungent smell of composting dairy cow, or the bitter cold of a Wyoming winter, possibly the wood-burning smoke from the neighbor’s too short smoke stack.

A crop-duster buzzes your roof at six AM for the cornfield to the north needing some pest relief. The ebb and flow of the engine makes you duck slightly in cadence as you sit reading the paper delivered just before the plane took off. It is more than just a farm town. The pinto bean plant has been quiet for many years, the ‘for-sale’ sign rusted. The co-op thrives-a center for expensive fuel, quality feeds, and the place to get a Red Bull and a Snickers after school.

I remember the celebration at the opening of the new post office. There were speeches. The Postmaster’s of the surrounding small communities stood eating cake with the locals. All the lips were blue and green from the frosting. Everyone’s fingers gliding along the new boxes to find their number. Those who lived outside of town, somewhat bereft because their mail was delivered to their door.

If you head downtown at seven AM, noon, or 6:30PM, you will find a crowd at the Mead Cafe or the Die Hard Saloon-the name changes at 6PM. The food is simple. Home made. Connie’s burritos are a local favorite. The parking out front goes from pick-ups to sedans and back to pick-ups with a stray Harley mixed in any time of day.

Stay tuned for part two tomorrow.

Although this isn’t a Rumley, it is one of those big old iron horses!

These huge tractors will leave an impression on you. What strikes me first, what hits my nostrils and the back of my throat is a kind of burnt smell. It reminds me of a horse being hot shod, all tangy and singed. The smell coats your skin too, a gritty sort of oily feeling.

It’s humongous. I stand off to the side watching it spin the long wide belts powering the thresh machine. And standing in the pilot’s box, it seems even bigger when you’re looking out at the power you’re standing inside of and controlling.

This isn’t the one I stood on-mine was MUCH bigger!

Throttled up, the vibration resounds through your bones.

You see the spouts dripping oil to lubricate, the pop and fizz of the governor. Tom explains to me how it all works, but it is loud and I have a hard time hearing him, even though I’m desperately focused on his words because I want to badly to run this beautiful machine. He’s shown me the throttle and clutch and how to shut the gas off, and then he steps down. I kind of panic that he is leaving me to run it when the thresh machine and all those guys are counting on the Rumley to do what they need it to do.

What if they signal me to stop it or need it to go faster and I can’t remember how? Terrible scenarios flood my mind-chaos and mayhem-belts flying off, bundles clogging up the thresh machine, the Rumley bolting forward out-of-control!

This is a Case and it was so impressive!

Then I take a breath. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Roger. He’s leaning an arm on the Rumley and I know it’s safe. He won’t let anything happen, will tell me what to do if it’s needed. Soon enough, Tom returns to stand by me and when the signal comes to power down, he reminds me what to do. I pull the clutch, but not enough. Tom pulls it back, throttles down and shuts the gas off.