Midwestern Living
This is very first-drafty; sorta creative non-fiction; sorta fiction. I'm not sure where it's going yet. It doesn't really have a direction. This piece started out as a daydream on a day where I didn't have much else to do. So, here you go:
Dust coats the floor of the red barn so heavily that you leave footprints. When you climb the worn ladder rungs into the loft, dirt sticks to your hands. Even the sun beams streaming in from a window up near the roof, two stories above you, are filled with particles that dance slowly and convectionally upward. Old cobwebs, sewn by spiders long dead, trail down from the rafters. And there is loose straw everywhere, shuffling between your feet and the creaky floor boards.
Spend a few hours in this room throwing bales and your spit will turn black. Your arms will be covered in scratches and rashes. You'll be sweating heavily in the July heat that radiates through the tin roof.
But oh how cool a drink of water feels afterwards. How refreshing a simple breeze can be after no more than an hour in the loft.
The bales come fast, slowly climbing the clanky conveyor and falling in through the window near the roof, and the race is on to get one or two stacked against a wall before too many pile up under the conveyor. How remarkable, you think, that in a few days you will be able to reach up and touch the roof of this room, feel the heat pressing through the tin from the sky above, step over the rafters on top of the rising stacks.
This is what work means to you. You with three friends in a barn, stacking endlessly, sweating, talking and joking about girls at school. It doesn't really even matter if you get paid. Hard work and good company are rewards enough. At 17 you don't really care about money, needing just enough, maybe, to buy a few beers to drink while you sit out under the stars on the hood of a rusty Ford and chat with some of those girls you joked about. It's a good life, at 17, staring up at the stars, crushing on girls, getting a little buzzed on a road that's no more than two worn tracks through the middle of a corn field, working hard.
Work changes, though, and with it, so do you. Suddenly work becomes bills--car payments and rent, health insurance--until you can't work hard enough anymore and you're burnt out and stressed out and bitter and angry at what work has done to you. And sometimes you just wish that you could go back to the days of sweating in a barn, days when your ego makes you decline a dust mask offered by a gray-beard farmer, who understands your refusal, having once been 17 tossing bales with his friends in that very same barn years ago.
Dust coats the floor of the red barn so heavily that you leave footprints. When you climb the worn ladder rungs into the loft, dirt sticks to your hands. Even the sun beams streaming in from a window up near the roof, two stories above you, are filled with particles that dance slowly and convectionally upward. Old cobwebs, sewn by spiders long dead, trail down from the rafters. And there is loose straw everywhere, shuffling between your feet and the creaky floor boards.
Spend a few hours in this room throwing bales and your spit will turn black. Your arms will be covered in scratches and rashes. You'll be sweating heavily in the July heat that radiates through the tin roof.
But oh how cool a drink of water feels afterwards. How refreshing a simple breeze can be after no more than an hour in the loft.
The bales come fast, slowly climbing the clanky conveyor and falling in through the window near the roof, and the race is on to get one or two stacked against a wall before too many pile up under the conveyor. How remarkable, you think, that in a few days you will be able to reach up and touch the roof of this room, feel the heat pressing through the tin from the sky above, step over the rafters on top of the rising stacks.
This is what work means to you. You with three friends in a barn, stacking endlessly, sweating, talking and joking about girls at school. It doesn't really even matter if you get paid. Hard work and good company are rewards enough. At 17 you don't really care about money, needing just enough, maybe, to buy a few beers to drink while you sit out under the stars on the hood of a rusty Ford and chat with some of those girls you joked about. It's a good life, at 17, staring up at the stars, crushing on girls, getting a little buzzed on a road that's no more than two worn tracks through the middle of a corn field, working hard.
Work changes, though, and with it, so do you. Suddenly work becomes bills--car payments and rent, health insurance--until you can't work hard enough anymore and you're burnt out and stressed out and bitter and angry at what work has done to you. And sometimes you just wish that you could go back to the days of sweating in a barn, days when your ego makes you decline a dust mask offered by a gray-beard farmer, who understands your refusal, having once been 17 tossing bales with his friends in that very same barn years ago.
posted by Brad Smith at 10:20 AM
1 Comments:
Hi Brad Smith!
Yea! I hope it's ok that Oren sent me here to send you a note -- I was talking about you to someone the other day, and realized how long it had been since I talked to you, and that I was uber sad about that. So, here I am.:)
I'd love to send you an email -- email me here (memoell@ilstu.edu) with your address, if you'd like. I'd love to catch up.
BTW, I've been doing lots with narrative (surprise, surprise), and I LOVED this post. More on that in a forthcoming email...
mm
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