In the tradition of John Steinbeck and Kent Haruf…
A literary short story about an old man's fight to save his farmyard from a noxious weed…and to save himself and those he loves from Old Mortality….
From the story:
But he didn't see himself as old. Old was Mrs. Halvorssen, Lloyd's mother-in-law, who had lived out here with Lloyd and Marion during the last ten years of her life. Her black shoes and hair like bleached cornsilk. Old was men sitting on cafe stools, buying each other coffee through an afternoon, oblivious to the world passing beyond the win¬dow other than to note the weather. It was men after church with broad, bony, age-stained hands clamped to canes, guided up the porch steps of a neighbor's house for coffee and rhubarb bread. They died in their sleep or in the bathroom, and their funerals were tedious affairs, with few tears.
Mornings before the alarm went off Lloyd still dreamed of not hav¬ing his homework finished and being called on to say who wrote Julius Caesar in Mrs. Stanley's English class. He dreamed of his father's quick-stepping walk and admonishing eyebrows, and being late with chores. He dreamed of picking juneberries hot mornings with Rosalee Burback when he was nine and so in love his ears rang. Deep down he was still that same boy. Little had changed—until he looked in the mirror or became winded from an evening walk to the railroad spur.
A literary short story about an old man's fight to save his farmyard from a noxious weed…and to save himself and those he loves from Old Mortality….
From the story:
But he didn't see himself as old. Old was Mrs. Halvorssen, Lloyd's mother-in-law, who had lived out here with Lloyd and Marion during the last ten years of her life. Her black shoes and hair like bleached cornsilk. Old was men sitting on cafe stools, buying each other coffee through an afternoon, oblivious to the world passing beyond the win¬dow other than to note the weather. It was men after church with broad, bony, age-stained hands clamped to canes, guided up the porch steps of a neighbor's house for coffee and rhubarb bread. They died in their sleep or in the bathroom, and their funerals were tedious affairs, with few tears.
Mornings before the alarm went off Lloyd still dreamed of not hav¬ing his homework finished and being called on to say who wrote Julius Caesar in Mrs. Stanley's English class. He dreamed of his father's quick-stepping walk and admonishing eyebrows, and being late with chores. He dreamed of picking juneberries hot mornings with Rosalee Burback when he was nine and so in love his ears rang. Deep down he was still that same boy. Little had changed—until he looked in the mirror or became winded from an evening walk to the railroad spur.
Used availability for Peter Brandvold's The Spurge War