The Magic of Ordinary Days by Ann Howard Creel Read Free Book Online

So I closed my mouth before I could say a word to Ray.
    The next morning, after I’d made pancakes and fried eggs for breakfast, Ray drank coffee and lingered until the sun was well up into the eastern sky. I asked him about the harvest, and he answered by naming machinery and listing a nondescript course of events I had difficulty following. He told me about various fields, reminding me that he had shown them to me during our drive. But I couldn’t remember one field from another, although I pretended I could.
    After he went out to the truck and drove away, I sat until my coffee turned cold. I finished cleaning the kitchen and watched the breeze coming in through the window screen, how it lifted the curtain into an arc, dropped it, then lifted it again.
    How could something as big as this farm feel so confining? I’d only been here a week, but it felt more like a month. And I’d never spent so much time alone before. Already I’d discovered the weird things I was capable of doing, the thoughts I was capable of entertaining, during too much free time. I’d already examined my hair up close in the mirror and categorized all the different strands of color I found there. I’d studied my toes, counted clouds in the sky, and tried to discern the different facial expressions that could be made by a cow. I’d wondered how many people would die overseas in the time it took me to make up my bed.
    Soon I folded up my apron, changed from loafers to sneakers, and headed for the outbuildings I’d been staring down ever since my arrival. I found the barn guarded at the open doors by a milk cow that was so big up close I hate to admit it scared me. From behind the cow, a long-eared hound plodded out the barn doors. I had seen him from afar several times before, but he’d kept his distance from the house. Now as I stood outside the barn, he chugged up to me like a streetcar going uphill. He padded circles about me, sniffing my scent that had fallen down into the dust. I reached down and rubbed the bony top of his head and stroked down his backbone—a string of marbles set out under a rug.
    â€œHey, boy,” I whispered to him.
    Now he sniffed around my neck and huffed out dog breath that made me smile and remember. When I was a child, we’d never been allowed a pet. But Abby, Bea, and I had often visited a neighbor who kept a yard full of schnauzers and miniature poodles, so we grew up with some knowledge of pets and no fear of dogs. When one of the poodles gave birth to a litter, we each chose a favorite before those pups had a chance to open their eyes. Although we couldn’t take them home, Abby and Bea chose fat white ones, and I picked a wriggling black that reminded me of a caterpillar. I still remember the name I gave him: Shadow.
    That old hound padded along with me as I moved on. We passed by rows of crops lined out to the horizon. This was a place of leaves, stalks, and stems in every shade of green, ordered and watered by man but grown by the blue, dry sky. The land was breathing deeply. Human exchange of air seemed meager compared to all the synthesis going on at ground level, and the houses and buildings seemed simply like small boxes of right angles and deadwood planks surrounded by all these big, buzzing fields.
    A clay-colored tumbleweed wedged between rows of green leaves caught my eye. Thorny, trapped, and out of place, it let me know the insignificance of any one, distinctive thing caught in a place so mapped with sameness. Aunt Eloise and Aunt Pearl had once accused me of hiding out in school. Instead Father had sent me into hiding here, where the openness of land and sky made hiding out about as unlikely as finding clover among the sage.
    I went past a windmill that pumped water out of the well, a wind charger that Ray had told me provided our electricity, and a gasoline storage tank. Behind the barn and next to the livestock pond, I found the last of the