Meadowlark

I was eleven. My sister and I had just finished an early morning chore with Dad at the “east place.” We were ready to go home. Our house was a scant quarter of a mile from the farmstead where we stood. The June sunshine flooded the meadow that separated the two places, and spotlighted our back door across the way. The door opened. Mom stepped out with a white basin under her arm. She shaded her eyes with her other hand, spotted us and shouted, “You-hoo!”

We waved wildly back as though we had not seen her for ages, and shouted our, “You-hoos” back. We needed to hurry, because obviously Mom was going to pick strawberries into that white basin for the first time this year.

I opened the gate to the meadow. We first stepped onto the concrete feeding floor where several pigs had gathered for a drink of water. Aluminum hog fountains stood on the concrete. Pigs had to poke their snout under a hinged lid to reach the water, drink, then back out making a clatter as the lid came down. This noise was so constant that we scarcely heard it any longer. We stepped off the concrete and onto the meadow grass. In the pasture grasses were occasional weeds we called dog fennel. It was a lacy plant with tiny white daisy-like blossoms. When the plant was crushed, it gave off a pungent odor like catnip. I kind of liked the smell and stepped on as many as I could. My sister said it gave her a headache.

I ran for the climbing-over place in the fence that defined our property. Once over that fence, we were in our chicken yard. Hens lurched around scratching the earth and complaining to one another in long moaning sentences. There was the klink of the backyard gate as we closed it behind us. We were in our back yard where laundry flapped on the line, and wrens warbled in and out of birdhouses nailed to posts.

In the garden, our mother was picking strawberries at the far end of the patch. She straightened her back, hands on hips, and smiled. A meadowlark alit on the telephone wire. He sang his perfect-pitch, joyous, eight-note song. I picked a mostly ripe berry, and popped it into my mouth. It was shudderingly sour!

“Hi, Mom! How’re you doin’?”

Where has it gone?

Where has it all gone-the people, the houses, the purpose, the mission?

Who will ever remember this? Any of this?

Who will know where the climbing-over place is when I am gone?

Perhaps the meadowlark.

Even now he sings his perfect-pitch eight-note song.

Such a sad song!

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