Tales From the Burning Prairie

The sun sets so late now that I am hardly ever out after dark. All of us are usually home by 7 or 8, so we can get the kids into bed by 9. Right now when I put my daughter to bed there is still the barest hint of day in the Western sky and her room is dim instead of dark. That transitional time between sunset and night, The Blue Hour as it is often called, is my favorite time of day. It is the gloaming. Gloaming creeps out like a cat, to soften the dying light and lend an air of unreality where even the harsh and ugly is rendered kindly.

When I am stuck indoors at the gloaming, I pine to be outside and when I am outside, I ache for those few magic minutes to stretch into hours. So it was that I found myself out and about at my favorite time of day/night. It was just a short trip to the grocery store for the mundane things of life, but it is always thus. For me, it is the ordinary tasks of life that lead to extraordinary insights.

As I drove I could see houses lighting up from the inside. Do the people inside wait until nearly dark to pop on the lights or do they leave them on all day, only to become visible in the dark? And I happened to see an architectural feature I’ve noticed before. Picture windows.

Exactly who is supposed to see the picture? Is it for the people inside; do they look out their picture windows only to see the house across the street, with its own picture window? Or is the picture for those outside; pictures of what goes in inside? They do frequently allow us to see vignettes of other lives.

My House doesn’t have one of these curious things. The parts of our House that face the street are bedrooms and are very closed-in and private. The entire back of the House is a glass wall, completely open, but only to the back yard. We would have to work pretty hard to let passers-by see into our lives. A lot of other houses in our neighborhood were built at the height of the picture window-era. And we often see glimpses inside, as we are driving or walking by.

Maybe we get to see bustling scenes of people going about their daily lives: having dinner, watching television, playing, fighting. Often we see curtains open to show off a static room, quiet and still as if it were frozen in amber. Humans rarely grace these rooms, except to dust the plastic plants or fluff pillows that have no need of fluffing. Children are never allowed in these rooms, and really, there is nothing for children to do there. The only reason children would even go in there is to see Mom turn just that exact shade of purple.

It is the stuffiest, dullest room in the house, one that only adult guests are subjected to, possibly as a form of veiled hostility. Mom says it is a room for a company, but it isn’t. She resents their presence as well, this is a room in which the only acceptable “guests” are those outside of it. You are to admire it from afar, to gaze in wonder at its lifeless perfection. These often tiny rooms have nothing to do with the way people live, they are disconnected from family life. And I feel a shiver of delicate horror whenever I see these dead spaces.

This striving for perfection is understandable, and impossible. I, too, would love to have one room stay clean for longer than a few hours. But I just don’t have the space to spare to say, “Look, the rest of my life may be chaos, but this room always stays perfect.” If I did have an extra room it would be a playroom, an office, a sewing and ironing room, a workout room. It would not be a dead space.

What kind of picture would I want people to see? A moving picture, a snapshot of daily life, or time-lapse pictures in which to see my children grow up. But I think I will skip the still-life, with its cut flowers, rotting fruit, and ever-present death.

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Not too many years back, the governor issued burn ban after burn ban because of the wildfires ripping through our state. I live in midtown, but some of the fires got close enough to town for us to smell them in our backyard. The very air left the taste of charcoal at the back of my throat. Years of drought had turned the prairie into a tinderbox. Ranchers were suffering, but many generous folks from out of state donated hay so their animals could eat.

At the same time the prairie was burning, I began writing again. Thus the name of my blog. One of my closest-held dreams when I was young was to be a writer. But life intervened and I never got around to making that dream come true. Years later, when I was sure that I had expended all my creativity to create two beautiful children, I found my voice again. In blogging.

How I wish that I had know about this during that first horrid, post-partum-depression-wracked year after my son was born. (Or that blogging had even existed during the five years I battle infertility.) But I remained ensconced in my milky isolation, never even guessing how many mothers were out there, mothers who felt just like I did.

Now, after the fires and during the deluge, here am I, writing free. Free of those who actively discouraged me from writing for a living, free of those who simply did not care to stand in my corner, free of concern for how others (even family) see me.

The earth is lush and green and soggy with ideas. The temperatures are kind and the air scrubbed clean by the constant rain. Now all I need is summer’s bright promise to see what will bloom.

The wind has really been sweeping down the plains this week, blowing the trees back and forth. More limbs have fallen out of the trees, shaken from their tenuous holds by these seasonable winds. Today, as I was walking the kids up to the playground, we noticed that the grass was getting kind of long. Monkey pointed and yelled, “Look at the grass!” I replied, “Yeah, it looks like it’s waving.” Then he said, “No, the grass looks like it’s dancing!”

Did I spawn a poet or what?