Tessie D

It’s starting to get cooler during the day, and for all the misery that we have to endure in the summer, there is nothing more beautiful than Texas in September and October.

Since I was starting to get a little stir-crazy in the office, I decided today that I would take a walk down the road, just along the dairy fence line during my lunch break. Some of the dairy hands looked at me, and a few waved.

I walked up the lane, passed the dairy barn. I could hardly hear the hand’s shouting over the sound of the cows mooing and clanging around in the corrals.

I reached the gate and stepped cautiously over the cattleguard, careful not to slip and fall. I’d heard of a kid in school who was trying to run across a cattle guard and broke his leg when his foot slipped in between the metal rows. I turned left onto the dirt road and walked along the side of the road, as close to the fence line as I could.

The midday sun was shining directly overhead, so I had little shade and no shadows, but the air was cool, and the further I got from the dairy, the quieter it became. All I could hear was the wind coming across the pasture, the rustle of the grasses blowing in the wind, and a horsefly buzzing near my ankle.

Eventually, a couple of trucks hauling round bales passed me by, kicking up the chalky limestone dust of the caliche road that crept into my nose and made me sneeze. The rumble of the tires on the road echoed for a while after they’d passed.

Someone was out on the tractor, cutting down the sudan in the front 40. The stalks stretched out in front of the tractor were tall and dry. They looked like spears standing straight up into the air after several months of little rain in the unbearable heat. Like one of those rooms in a medieval castle that would impale intruders who’d fallen to their deaths.

The cutting would be finished today, and tomorrow the pasture would be raked and maybe baled.

By Saturday, the field would be dotted with at least 200 large, tightly wound bales, arranged in at least four rows up near the barn, each as long as a football field.

The landscapes and the labors…