Tag: Missouri

Three Persimmons

~ johnbrandall

Today I ate three small, round, plump persimmons.  They were of an orange hue, tasting somewhat sweet, a little juicy.  Fleshy.  I didn’t know much about persimmons until recently.  Probably I ate one or two somewhere along the line but when and where and why I cannot say.  These persimmons were from a stately tree with silver-green leaves that stands out now in the north end of the cattle pasture at a place I call Farm, a plot of sixty acres of mixed pasture, scrub, and hardwood forest in eastern Miller County, Missouri.  

This past winter I set out to begin relieving this land of the burden, of the scourge of eastern redcedar infestation.  These cedar trees, which aren’t actually cedars at all but a type of juniper that grows as a tree, grow at a quickened pace.  With speed and numbers on their side, a gang of cedars will take over just about any landscape, encircling older and taller trees, choking them out, robbing them of water and other resources...  


This short essay continues here...

A Farmhouse Almanac

~ johnbrandall

Today was mowing.  Hours of mowing the grass surrounding this old farmhouse.  After timely rain all summer the ground has dried out as September lurches on, dateline Traderight, Missouri.

I arrived here late this morning, some dew still in the grass, the moisture bad for mowing.  But that was fine because first priority was to get the well’s jet pump working better.  When I left here two weeks ago the water was running but the pump would not reach its cut-out pressure; it would not kick off.  A pump can’t run like that.  If it does, it’ll burn itself out...  

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Rings and Keys in Ste Genevieve

~ johnbrandall

Rental house done
in typewriter theme
boxed wine in the fridge
fuzzy comet up high

Typewriter ribbon
run dry
ink disappearing
into dust
lost as a sinking
creek

Baseball delayed by disease
five planets visible
all-numeric password
my wife and I
driving in the dark
in a very old town
that neither of us knew
to get our eyes on a comet
no one knew would be there

Corona is
a brand of typewriter
of beer
of pruning tool
a constellation Borealis
a fancy word for halo:

That ring we saw during the solar eclipse
that pearly glow

A gaseous envelope
burning hotter
than the Sun itself

Grosvenor Slab

~ johnbrandall

2

Imagine the sound of that comet,
Its tail a contrail split in two,
Dust and fried ice, the Sun
Seething with impotence
As the comet passed it by,
Somehow staying together.
Then I saw it the way I saw it,
Wicked blue morning,
Cows in the field with
Better eyes than me
But there on the horizon
A comet
Upside down, breeching, glowing with
Prank light
An hour before dawn...


Entire poem this way...

June in the Vespiary with the Push Mower

~ johnbrandall

I.

I'm out at Farm. Yeah, I know, surprise, surprise. Small green bugs—gnats, aphids—swarm the lightbulb overhead. They cling, somehow, upside down to the ceiling, making a marina out of faux-wood paneling.

It's finally dark out. June bugs fling themselves against the front door. Something dots the back of my neck, I try to chase it away. Today, June 14th, Flag Day. I'm here to mow, an insane endeavor depending so much on a car, a push mower, gasoline, and this forty-year-old body. Wall sounds, probably the pack rat. My approach to this old farm house, earlier today, descending the gravel road, sent two groundhogs scurrying across the front yard I would soon get to clipping. They disappeared to somewhere, probably into that hole slipping under the front of the house, just west of the stoop...


The essay continues...

Look Here, Boys: The Calamitous Fall of One of Farm’s First Owners.

~ johnbrandall

I don’t know when or why the marriage of Milford to Stella Burns collapsed. 

But knowing so gave me reason to view the life of Milford Duncan with a certain wariness.  His marriage to Stella was finished by 1919 at the latest. This I know for sure because in early November of 1919 Milford was married for the third time, to Ella Noblett (b. 1881, location unknown). 

Ella Noblett herself had previously been married; she widowed a man named Coates, an Englishman who was closely associated with the rise of Maries Bank. Said to be a shrewd businessman, he also had a hotel operation in Vienna. When he died in 1917 from influenza, he was said to be worth rather a lot of money...


The Story of Milford Duncan...

I Don’t Know What It Is About A Field

~ johnbrandall

In eastern Butler County the fields opened up, took on the wispy gold of uncut hay. Not long after that hills appeared. I could see the outcome of geological events, the hint of a rock facade where the road cut through. But the grass didn't mind the hills and it ran long and uncut up and down the slopes still. A valley appeared, a vantage, a vista. I thought of some of that scene from Dances With Wolves where they creep up to a crest and look down to see a herd of buffalo grazing in peace.

It would've been a good place to stop but I was going 75 and I was only an hour into the drive. It's a spot to think about, for another. A spot worth reaching over into the glove compartment and pulling out this notebook for, an emergency notebook, never been written in before, the two notebooks I did bring secure in my bag.

I'm east of Wichita, KS on U.S. Highway 54, where Butler County ends and Greenwood County begins. Hay, cow ponds, the cattle so dark against the golden light of the field, dark against the blue of the sky, against the shapely hills.

FDR had some sort of windbreak tree-planting program. A shelterbelt. I never gave much thought to windbreaks, to trees as a line against the wind. This tree I keep seeing, that is so prevalent, must have been one of the trees of choice for the shelterbelt planting. It's often got a lopsided crown and most of the time its trunk splits into two not far from the ground, a couple of feet, maybe less. This tree, whatever it is, is not at Farm. It's a Dust Bowl thing. Kansas, Oklahoma, the Texas panhandle, northeastern New Mexico.


Continue with Part One of this travelogue...

Hay Bales, Highway 50

~ johnbrandall

I realized there was more to Missouri
that summer, working in the middle of the state.

On Fridays I'd take Highway 50 from
Jeff City to Union, through antique towns,
past fields of hip-high grass that hushed
wispy and soft, green-gold in
June and July's late-setting light.

The spell would break hard when
I hit the interstate, leaving only a fleeting
afterimage as I braced for the
reality of lane changes and going
home, to my parents.

One August evening, somewhere west of Rosebud
I drove past a field whose grass was freshly
cut, left to hay in shaggy rolls, two dozen
of them spread out like a herd of bison grazing
quiet in a pasture holding nothing else
but a single sun-soaked tree.

At its far end the field ran up against a treeline,
giving rise to one of Missouri's unsung hills.
Above the hill a hawk tracked higher on
a thermal while cumulus and contrail
slowly absorbed the colors of the sunset.

I was late getting home that night.
When my parents asked me where I'd been I
said nothing, only handed them
this photograph.

Memory Foam

~ johnbrandall ~ 1 Comment

It is broken.  Does it require of me that I buy a new spacer kit?  What if I counter-offer with a brand new ball assembly?

The right answer ran between the left guard and the left tackle, to the house.

I am from Illinois but I live in Missouri.  This does not make me anxious.  I do not spend an hour a day imagining the explanations I will offer as justification when someone asks me, "What are you doing here?"  Or says, in the pejorative, "Go back to your Land of Lincoln..."


Full story here...