Picture Sketch 2: Barn of Zeus

One moment it caresses your cheek and fills your nostrils with the smell of new crops or sweet, pungent lilacs.  Next it slaps you in the face making you walk with a forward tilt, as though you were climbing a steep hill.  This son of Zeus, this prairie wind, worries everything it touches - worries it to death.

Trees, houses, barns and people, all have a beginning and an end, but this wind has neither - it lives forever.  I watch it flail against these old, abandoned farm buildings.  While the walls and roofs are present, I can sense the lives that cycled through the rooms.  In the barn - with old rotting hay still in the mangers - I sense the cows and horses that found shelter there from the winter winds.  In the farmhouse - where a wood stove stands, too old to be removed - I sense the warmth that once radiated through the kitchen while hearty meals were prepared and eaten.

Bit by bit, the wind has ushered the life out of this farm home.  Yet the spirits of the family are still here and will escape only when the roof collapses and the walls fall; then the wind will whisk them to the heavens where they will be lost forever.

How can the children of the prairies who come back to their homes do anything but cry?  Their home, house and barn alike, are now empty weather-beaten shells, the walls barely standing, the roofs open to the stars and  weather.  In the yard, the trees their grandfather planted are blown into distorted forms.  But surely those trees can bring some comfort.  Clinging to life, they remain as sentinels around a space that was once a home, warm with life and love.