1960
In a Cesna, my boyfriend and I flew a few hundred feet above the twisting Whetstone River, and then he swooped us down even lower over my childhood farm.
The gentle hills were flattened. They lost their contours. The great twists of the river were diminished; the proud oaks and cottonwoods lost their height, and their pride. And then with a shift of the clouds the deep green leaves, the bronze of the river, even the black spots of my father’s cows (that I spied in the pasture) lightened. All that I love faded to shades of gray. That beloved parcel of land had become an unfamiliar fading photograph.
© Barbara Scoblic 2019