Two Short Hits

 

     Cindy and I were on a high school skip day, holding hands on a bench at the entrance to a veterans’ cemetery on a hill above Hot Springs, South Dakota.  The rest of our classmates were in the springs down in town. 

     Maybe it was the little rows of crosses reminding me that life is a finite deal, or perhaps it was the Nebraska ditch weed. I was overwhelmed. In a fit of teen emotion I rather too loudly said “I love you.”

     She looked into my eyes, smiled, and said “That is weird. Let’s go swimming.”

 

      Earl Marshall and I were in his truck on a gravel road that runs along the edge of Mount Fanny, three thousand feet above Cove, Oregon and the Grand Ronde valley. Way down below the farmers were burning off the stubble from that year’s wheat harvest. 

     I remarked that I had grown up in wheat country and did not remember anyone’s ever burning off the stubble, that in western Nebraska it was disked under and laid fallow for a year to help the soil.

     Earl, thirty years my senior, said “Heck J. D., in today’s way of doing things that dirt is there just to hold the plants up. All the food is applied by air or tractor.”