Tales From the Burning Prairie

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?

Words. I love words and think about them a lot. Reading, writing, speaking, rolling them around on the tongue like pieces of candy, and only letting them out once they’ve been properly ruminated over. English was always my favorite subject as well as my mother tongue. That’s a wonderful phrase, mother tongue, meaning the language we learned as babies from our mothers. But I think it has another definition: it is the language that gave birth to our minds; language is our mother. We use words to shape our reality. Our opposable thumbs let us manipulate rude tools with our hands, but words let us use a far more powerful and sophisticated tool: the mind.
Words are tools themselves. And weapons. We use them to hurt others all the time.
Words can also heal: I’m sorry, let me help, I love you. But words are best when we use them to tell ourselves about ourselves.
My favorites are so succint and descriptive that to replace them you would have to use whole phrases, sentences, or paragraphs instead. Some of them aren’t even English, such as Gestalt and Doppleganger. Some are more unusual, such as Serendipity.
But some are more basic concepts, such as Lonesome. Lonesome is a perfect word, so rich and descriptive that my heart feels an echo of an ache at its mere mention.
Alone is a choice, lonely is a whine, but lonesome is an existence. All of us have been utterly alone now and again, some even prefer it. Loneliness is part of the human condition, like body odor or ignorance; something to guard against. Lonesome is more than just a state of profound aloneness and loneliness. A person who is lonesome is always lonesome even in a crowd of others. Lonesome has been lonely for so long as to become incurable.
Lonesome is walking through this life with no one beside, no one to share, no family, no friends, not even a dog. I sometimes think of hoboes when I hear lonesome.
So, people are lonesome: those without a home, no place to lay down the weariness when it becomes too heavy to bear. You hear about the poor souls who die alone, by choice or chance, with no one to mark their passing from this life. How about those folks who hedge themselves about with ceiling-high stacks of old newspapers and bags of garbage they can’t bear to part with; they are so lonesome that they try to fill the void with trash.
A member of my husband’s family was one such sad soul. He died not long after Hubby and I married. His parents were long gone, and his remaining family couldn’t do much for a grown man in his own house. After he passed, his family had to hire professional cleaners to clear out the debris, all that was left of a lonesome life. His was a life lonesome by choice; no one to tell him what to do or not to do, no responsibilities outside his own skin, no compass to guide the way.
Things and experiences can be lonesome, too, because they evoke that feeling in the human heart. Think how you feel when you happen to be the only one in the house awake at 3:30 in the morning and you happen to hear the lonesome cry of a distant train whistle. There can’t possibly be enough traffic to need the warning, is the whistle the train’s proof to itself that it exists? “I’m here! I’m here!”
I love the sight of a broken-down barn, its wood gone grey with age, its roof half-collapsed or sagging in the middle. So many siding-boards missing that it casts a very snaggle-toothed shadow. Maybe surrounded by cattle, maybe just by scrubby trees and weeds.
There’s an abondoned trestle bridge on Keetonville Road. It got so old and rickety, they just decided to curve the road around it and fence it off. Even though some hardy fishermen still scale the fence to sink a line off of it, I think the old bridge is lonesome now that it doesn’t serve its real purpose anymore.
Words like Lonesome are such wonderful tools. They let us “try on” the conditions or experiences they describe, without the commitment.
So, next time you’re awake at 3:30 in the morning and you hear that train whistle calling, or the solitary cry of a coyote if you live out a ways, think Lonesome. Let the word seep into your brain and let the feeling fill your soul. Then, after you’ve Lonesomed for a while, let it go, roll over, hug your sweetie and embrace another good word-Dream.