BluestoneReview

Earnings By Connie Jordan Green

She would like to think she earned the ease of old age, paid her dues

those first years on the farm—no heat, a deep well with a cantankerous pump given to freezing on twenty-degree nights, babies who woke from naps screaming with earaches, the long drive to a doctor in town, rains that washed out the driveway, drought and heat that fried the garden. She likes to think there was a scorekeeper recording the difficult times, totaling them against soft days due her. But she knew there were no scales, knew life could have become more brutal but didn’t, that her joys through those early years more than outweighed her troubles, that old age, like grace, comes pouring over you, undeserved, but, oh, so welcome, your face, like a sunflower, turning toward light. Citizen of the Unseen By Connie Jordan Green Today I’m happy wandering the fields, poking around in the woods, no thoughts of civilization with her crowded towns, her suburbs of neat houses on postcard lawns, where beetles are pesticided to oblivion, and birds become more silent each year, a place devoid of insects of air and meadow. Today I’m a citizen of the unseen—spiders with their webs glistening in fall fogs, catching what is too small for the human eye, sufficient nourishment to guarantee another generation, mosses softening rock outcroppings, turning fallen logs into cushions where I rest a moment, lichens a troll’s wig caught on a low branch. Today the roadsides are a florist shop of Joe Pye weed, ironweed, crown beard, and aster. Today the trees are an art gallery. Today I need no city, no downtown, no traffic except the hawk in his endless circling, eyes keen for that perfect landing strip, rabbits and rodents the only life on his radar.

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