Aside from family, what I most remember about the farm is the wheat. I recall staring as if hypnotized by it -- miles of swaying, rolling, undulating gold under the raw blaze of a prairie sky. In our first summer there, the mature stalks stood above our heads. We played hide-and-seek among the fields, carefully side-stepping the brambles that grew wild through the crop until our mother admonished us for ruining the landlord's livelihood. When we couldn't play in the fields anymore, we took to the trees. Long rows of them that stretched as a windbreak between the house and the fields beyond. The trees provided a clear border we were not to cross, and certainly didn't -- at least, not for the first few years. The space within those trees became the entirety of our universe.
We had no television. We had few books or toys. There were no after-school classes designed to bolster curriculum in those days, not where we came from. Therefore, like our mother before us, we made our own fun. Our parents built us a three-leveled tree fort with a square plywood base and a smaller middle platform which had a discarded bunk-bed ladder leading to a poop deck made of an old table top. From its formica surface, you could see as far as the highway, miles away. The landlord moved his pigs out of the barn and that space was also claimed for our amusement, along with two abandoned vehicles at the back edge of the home spread. Every conceivable moment was spent out-of-doors, inventing elaborate scenarios in which we would always emerge as the timely and triumphant heroes.
When we weren't engaged in imaginary pursuits, we were intimately examining the world around us: salamanders, garter snakes, frogs, ducks, geese, grasshoppers, and elusive dragonflies that glittered with foil bodies of blue, green, red, and rarest of all -- gold. We believed those dragonflies to be magical creatures that would glow with the same irridescent color of their daytime skins if only we could catch one in jar and sneak it past our mother's watchful gaze to our bedside table.
In that first summer, our father gave up his job in the city and found one closer to home as a used-car salesman. One of the perks of his job was that it came with a car. He would frequently turn in the old one for whatever new model on the lot had taken his fancy. How rich we believed ourselves to be in those days. Our father was the only father we knew who had a new car, every week! Also new to the family that first year was my sister Stacy, the sixth and final child of our family. I can still recall all the romper sets my mother had sewn and proudly hung around the dining room in anticipation of her arrival. Somehow, she also managed to seed the yards, surround them with flowerbeds, and plant a city-sized block of vegetables out behind the house at the same time.
