We hold opinions a little longer here, sequestered for maximum effect; state them a little softer then release them on breezes that bob across the thick black loam. Washing teats and fixing milkers ties our time. Eggs await collection, the tractor’s hay spear needs swapped out for the snow plow, the neighbor wants a game of cards, there’s that field of winter wheat, and there’s cattle to move.
December 15 – Winters in Germany meant my mother and her siblings would scour the Black Forest for twigs and branches to fuel their woodstove. They were hungry and meat was rationed. Horse meat was parceled out, and she can’t recall if it tasted like chicken. In spring, they stole apples from orchard trees. But once her several male cousins were conscripted for Hitler’s army, they were given more, had more to fill their sickened stomachs.
December 16 – People do clone best; clone is what we do. We forget that sky is not a clone. Dirt is not a clone. Every animal moves to its own swaying unflustered by the concept of uniformity. Yet still we shram in ice, and a frigid day will carry on, regardless. When does the light flicker on, when does individuality strike us soundly enough that we finally say, I am, I am, I will be rare and new. In Iowa we let slide the too-deep, but for the chisel plow and the old rusty harrow.
December 17 – Down the road, they got a new haybine, put drainage lines in their back forty. We see shades of sky based on our peculiar vantage point. Silo. Sheep manger. University. What it boils down to is finding your place at the back of the line because there’s meatloaf enough for everyone.
December 18 – Angus dot the pastures east and west of us, black specks on white slopes. Cattle can freeze with the right mix of elements: moisture, wind, and colder than normal temperatures. Cows can die in the field; rain soaks them too deeply, or snow covers them, the wind chills them too long, and the dropping temperature encases them like a block of ice; they can’t manufacture enough heat to stay alive. This happened in Wyoming and South Dakota in 2013 and in Texas in 2015. Tens of thousands of cattle froze to death. Just like that. Hooves on frozen legs sticking out of snowbanks.
December 20 – The running of the coyotes, nightly with noise, oh such hubbub. Coyotes are thieves which drag away newborn lambs at night. Two neighboring farmers lose a few each winter, and we lose chickens. Foxes do that too as do hungry raccoons or a feral dog here or there. Once a redtail hawk swooped down and snatched a bantam chicken from our back pasture. This rural stuff sharpens the flint, and prostrates the glib. I’m told it gets boring, but that’s only true when the night sky stares down on us starlessly.
German-born Chila Woychik has bylines in journals such as Silk Road, Storm Cellar, and Soundings East, and she was awarded the 2016 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction Award (Emrys Foundation). She craves the beautiful and lyrical, scours the pedestrian Iowan countryside for such, all while editing the Eastern Iowa Review.