The Cedarville Review 2020

PROSE | 55 people sat on the tailgates drinking cheap beer while crowds cheer for their hometown team a block away. The next morning, sun-wrinkled men with salt-and pepper hair would be up before the sun, sitting at the small-town diner drinkingMaxwell House coffee with their dusty, beat-up trucks lined at the curb. The rhythms of life were centered around football season, harvest season, hunting season, off-season, tor- nado season. The weather determined the days, and solid oak pews with red foampaddingwere chockfull on Sunday morning. We used to walk to the end of the gravel drive- way every evening to fetch the mail, tugging the Red Flyer wagon with Caleb, Grace, and a coffee can of fish food bouncing inside. On the way, dad flung the food in the pond while I wore his polarized sunglasses to watch the thick catfish bodies approach the surface with gaping mouths. When a storm came, we sat on the front porch, the static of a Royals baseball game sputtering from the battery-operated radio, sipping iced tea and rocking in squeaky chairs while watching the thunderheads roll across the flat plains. The first crack of thunder followed by fat warm raindrops plopping hap- pily onto the thirsty ground, the veins of soil soaking up the moisture eagerly and rivulets of runoff going to the pond. When the fiery sun set over the prairie and darkness settled in for the night, we would convene on the back deck, roasting s’mores over a fire pit, and pointing out the Milky Way galaxy, Orion, Andromeda, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, Cassiopeia, Venus and Mercury. Often, we observed a half dozen shooting stars; closing our eyes to pon- der the wishes. The insulated house walls witnessed the suc- cesses and failures of a family, the death of pets and oppressive diagnoses, shriveled hearts and doors slammed in anger, angry tires spitting gravel down the driveway, a little girl spying on her older sister kissing a boy, three children sitting at the bay window anxiously waiting for dad’s car to turn in the drive, and a dinner table with five seats filled in the evening. The last time I saw the end of our driveway, there was a For Sale sign pasted onto wire markers with a smiling relator staring into my rearview mirror. There was a new job with a relocation package pulling us to Missouri, invading our home, taking pictures and cramming items into boxes with hastily scribbled labels on them to be tossed into the back of a box truck.