Flash Nonfiction

"All men keep the farm in reserve as an asylum where, in case of mischance, to hide their poverty,– or a solitude, if they do not succeed in society." – Emerson, from Farming









One my way back early in the morning from dropping my daughter off school, pass by old original ramshackle of warehouse not far up from the backwater sloughs of the Black River, itself on its way to the Mississippi, a tributary, a flyway, a great expanding waterland of beige greens, cattails, flicking away at the tips of its broad sheets of seeming canvas below. Always there, just out of old red cadillac, the owner, slunched, gray frothy hair, opening up a metal lock or two by key, into half-broken doors to get into a nearly windowless building. Months ago, spring time must have got in that building, for he had a crew build him a nice new office overlook at the top of the second floor, white, a rising piece of perfect cake stemming up out of otherwise broken box of a cobbled building. And so I follow the footsteps up what must be a musty ascent up through root cellar-like walls, up stairs that likely lack a handrail, chipped at the stone, lightless, then up into an office which overlooks the woodmill, itself a fine clean assembly of wood stacks and yellow forklifts with front pronged teeth silver as stars blinking by night. "The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity," said Emerson of farmers, men who we know must have had two things always in those old days: the panorama to himself each day as he overalled out to his pastures and cornfields, that raw possession of not possessing, for he knew, as our man in his high tower this morning, overlooking his marshy landscape, that he is of this air, this time, this geology; but that he too must create, to purchase his hours, so to speak, to survive his days. "Then the beauty of Nature, the tranquility and innocence of the countryman, his independence and his pleasing arts – the care of bees, of poultry, of sheep, of cows...." Emerson goes on, is acknowledged care of things. I drive by slowly thinking of how to start my essay.