[Netjet!]

Started something for nanowrimo. Hope whoever reads it enjoys.

An Honest Journey

Back when my father was still alive, he told me something that would stick with me for a long time. We were working to clear some brush and the remnants of a fallen oak from a wild storm the night before, him rigging his old red tractor to the base of the wooden behemoth that lay before us. Down in Wyoming, seeing other people around that area was almost a rare sight – back in 1964 there were barely three hundred thousand in the entire state, let alone Weston County; so when you had a mess to clean up, you were usually left to your own device. As we hauled the remains of the Oak out of the ground and toward the wood shed, father began to whistle a familiar tune. It was the old nursery rhyme my mother used to sing to me when I cried on some cold nights, her way of trying to soothe my discomfort. See, back in those times we weren’t quite what you would call “lower class”, but if there was a solid line to represent it we would have been so close that you could almost taste it from where you stood.

My father tried his hardest to provide for me and my mother, boy he did. But the industry in Wyoming wasn’t quite what it used to be – starting during the Prohibition era, America’s dependence on Wyoming crops began to wane, as more populated and richer states like Iowa and Nebraska brought bigger technology and processes to harvest their crops quicker and for cheaper. Since then, farmers like my father had trouble staying afloat in such a competitive industry.

Some months, we couldn’t quite afford to keep the lights on, or the water running. I wasn’t old enough to understand why but I was at the age where curiosity was a new and exciting idea – to me, definitely not my parents. On those nights, I would crawl up against my mother, who would be sitting on our sofa in the main living room knitting a hand-made sweater for me. Being at home she liked to keep herself busy by taking up new hobbies, knitting being one of them. I would have to keep myself from laughing when she forgot to make a hole for my head, or made it longer than even my father’s entire body. This time, however, when she slipped my head and arms through the holes, it seemed to fit just right. She would rub my head for a while, tousling my short brown hair with her nimble fingers. And then she would whistle that familiar tune.

I don’t think there was ever a name for it, but whenever that song was whistled the hairs on the back of my neck would stand up on end, as if a cool wind had brushed my skin ever so gently. With that tune, I could feel my mother’s emotion seeping into my skin, gently caressing my soul until I fell into a deep slumber. As my father began to whistle this tune on his old red tractor, all I could feel was coldness. My mother died giving birth to my little brother three years ago; neither of them made it.