Freshwater Literary Journal 2021

Chila Woychik Twelve Rural There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. … We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. ―Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 1. According to Cherokee legend, in the beginning there was no land—only sea—and all animals lived in a rock vault in the sky. Water Beetle decided to explore the sea, and dove to the bottom, bringing back soft mud that spread out and became the island called Earth. The flapping of a vulture’s wings created mountains, and the animals ordered the sun to move from East to West.

Then Kanati (First Man) and Selu (First Woman) were created. This is how it started.

2. There’s the barn, but the rules keep changing. Cattle, sheep, goats. Big bales, small bales, fresh green grass. Chickens that lay green eggs and geese that let their young drown in a blue wading pool. Hardheaded rams and softly bleating lambs. You can’t get this off TV. You can’t make this up to suit the city imagination aching for rural. This isn’t the world. This is reality. This is what we have to live with. This is how we see.

3. My gentleman farmer is a mental man, preferring the life of the mind to body work. To climb upon our Deutz tractor these days means scaling Mount Everest, and to gas up the John Deere 4010 is to run a 10K marathon. But talk about Laplace transforms, wave propagation, or vectors, and he’s your man. A tractor he can fix, but an idea he can bring to full fruition, graying hair and slower gait notwithstanding.

4. A five-foot-long bull snake hung from the roosting bar in the duck house, its tail section wound tightly around the wooden rod. I grabbed a long stick and coaxed it out, scooted it on its way. It only wanted the duck eggs in the nest, and a higher platform to view from.

5. We feel closed in when the wind struggles hard and the snow grows deep, like beasts that perish at the knife end of hunger, like blurry wires strung across an empty sky, or the darkest parts of judgment. We feel closed in when just outside the door the expanse runs boundless.

6. She was old when we first met her ringing up groceries at a downtown shop.

After that, we’d see her push-mowing her own lawn, taking her dog for walks, and sitting at a table while watching a small television in her front room. She sat there alone, watching tv, and anyone driving by could see her and her small 142