Brave Enough to be Beautiful Along the Crust of a Sighing Globe
A man lay next to a woman in a field, face down, staring into the petals of pink and yellow wildflowers. A nuclear wind blows over their backs and scorches the earth, and a great malignant tumor rains down. They’ll call it meteorite, the large fleshy thing.
Every few years, our Cedar River misbehaves, heaves its banks, ejects a murky underbelly. In our floods, houseboats unleash and livestock drown in fields or barns, square miles of buildings and lands take on water. In 1993 when all 99 counties were declared disaster areas, or our 500-year flood of 2008, or the Missouri River Flood of 2011, it teaches us you can’t build a wall in a furious moment, or spline the hand of fate.
Derechos strip our yields, crown our trees. Straight-line winds of 2011 ripped the roof from the Mary Ingles Blind School and topped 150 beautiful trees in the city of Vinton. In 2013, another one, and in 2020, the biggest yet, all eastern Iowa under the umbrella of uncertainty and fear. The West’s wildfires and the hurricanes of the coastal regions. What rough environment when the world goes to hell. When tornados puff their bony chest or floods outgas frustration. When wild winds forget to pump their brakes. Who can battle Mother Nature with a credit card and luck? It’s a terrible world where a woman has to ask.
A Nobel Prize for fresh ideas that trawl along this bursting green earth or suggest handsome solutions to disarm the enemies, save the planet and sparkle the future. Bucked and broken, is this it, the softness gone? At sixty, after too much give and too little take, take pictures of a rolled up sky. The world has changed: rivers rise so we swim them. Fires flare, so we douse them. Winds blow and twirl, and we clean up the mess afterward. Through it all, we cart that courage in a homemade handbag, discover once we pet a thing it never leaves us alone.
Oh the sunsets to hang a heart on and the glass skies ripped and bronzed. Write a love song to yourself and play it in the contrivance called life. The conclusion is this: let’s hope as a sign of defiance against disasters that threaten to consume us. Let’s be alive and know it, and if everyone’s telling the truth, we can’t make these kinds of mistakes again. At sixty, plain road on. But don’t run, don’t run, just grab the loose scarf in the wind and wrap it around your neck.
Chila Woychik
Chila Woychik is originally from the beautiful land of Bavaria. She has been published in numerous journals including Cimarron and Passages North, and has released an essay collection, Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology (Shanti Arts, 2020). She won Storm Cellar's 2019 Flash Majeure Contest and Emry's 2016 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction Award. These days she tends sheep, chickens, and two aging barn cats, and roams the Iowan outback. She also edits the Eastern Iowa Review. www.chilawoychik.com