Published in Today's Visions, Volume VI, 1987-1987
(Original art and writing compiled by the Paint Valley Creativity Club)
Published by the Paint Valley Junior-Senior High School,
Bainbridge, Ohio, USA.
"So it's finished."
She kicked a red-orange dirt clod and it shattered on the cold ground.
Some of the crumbs dusted the brown shoes of her companion. "Yeah, it's started," he affirmed. They stood, scuffing the freeze-dried mud and watching the dust rise and fall.
She looked up at her backyard. "They started it up this morning. Only for a minute. The smell was terrible."
He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. "It was the council's choice to allow construction."
She looked at him. "The council isn't everybody."
"Then everybody should've made their voice known." He looked up as she kicked another dirt clod and then slowly ground out each crumb of frozen mud.
"Look at this!" She spoke with unexpected fury, glaring at her yard. "They tore up the whole eight and a half acres, spread mud and dust all over our house, scratched up all our fencerow trees..." Sighing, she looked to the mud. "...and that big old oak--a hundred years of history--now firewood and dynamited roots..." She crushed a dirt clod underfoot.
"Well, whatever...it's here," she calmly relented. A rare gust of wind blew dust around their feet and into her yard and beyond. ...........
A week later, she was on the other side of the village in a wide meadow, escaping from the apparition behind her house. After six straight days of that rotten stench, it was all she could stand. Since the weather had been brooding all morning and the leaden clouds hung low, even here the unmistakable scent permeated the air. It was not of snow.
She stood below a tremendous oak tree--the same size and age of the oak that had stood behind her house. This one had the same characteristic spiky whorl of limbs, the brown leaves clinging onto the edges, the few big dead branches firmly clamped onto the solid bole. It even had a thin decade-old lightning scar curved down around the tree trunk. She had noticed this monolithic tree, out alone in a field, while riding by in the scool bus. It surprised her how she could view the same scene for years and then, one day, see it in an entirely different way.
She walked over and patted the tree. Its weather-cured, sun-warmed bark with its deep furrows felt like the knowledgeable, wrinkled skin of her grandfather.
It had started snowing while she was thinking, she realized. She held out her gloved hand to catch some of the augmented snowfal. Looking up, several flakes landed in her eyes and she blinked. They almost stung.
When she looked down, grey snow was slowly and surely covering the clean rose pink of her gloves.
by KBC
Published in Today's Visions, Volume VI, 1987-1987
(Original art and writing compiled by the Paint Valley Creativity Club)
Published by the Paint
Valley Junior-Senior High School,
Bainbridge, Ohio, USA.
Ahh, my younger days, when I hiked several times a week in the great outdoors.
A little context would help those of you who did not grow up within smelling distance of Chillicothe, Ohio. A large paper mill there regularly scented the town with unpleasant chemical odors, which sometimes crept westward into my neck of the woods. It was the smell of money, and even thogh sometimes noxious, it meant employment and income for many people--and still does.
As for the destruction of nature and the rural environment for the sake of the predominant version of "progress"...well, I'm certain many of you have felt the same way I did. And still do.