The Weight of Country Afternoons

For many years, starting in my childhood, on drifting asleep or waking from daytime naps, I would see a dusty country road cutting through stubbly fields, with a solitary house to my right, across the nearest field.

The weather was always hot in my dream, or daydream, whatever you call it, and apparently a long drought had seared the fields and the huddled building, for dust covered the drooping weeds along the road cut. The pale sky was glaringly bright, the blue washed out, only a few small clouds dispiritedly hanging over the dry earth.

It was late in the day, because the shadows lay long across the fields and spilled out elongated from the tin-roofed house. I was walking on the road, a mostly dirt road with large chunks of limestone and smaller chert fragments embedded in the dry, packed clay. I was oppressed by approaching that house, in that dry field, framed by those long shadows in such a heavy weight of heat and late-afternoon light. Something about the silence of the scene-for no birdcall or sound of machinery pierced the coppery air-added to the odd quality of light and heavy shadows.

In my dreams or reveries I never reached the house. What lingers is the sense of doom and emptiness of the day, headed towards a house I did not know but knew somehow held nothing but sadness and loss for me. I dreamt of this scene and house for years before I ever knew much of farms and farming, before I ever subscribed to Mother Earth News or read all the back-to-the earth literature of the late sixties and early seventies. Perhaps my unconscious was warning me about the perils of a suburban boy growing up to buy a farm and having to deal with omnivorous sows and feckless tenants.

I don’t think so. Something much deeper was in that dream. I wonder if it will return, and when. It is as though by dreaming of passing along that road, I walked over my own grave and gave myself a chill in spite of the heat of the dusty dry landscape. Or maybe I just had spells of indigestion.

I don’t believe that, either.