Lindsey Morris Carpenter # 1

            Lindsey Morris Carpenter is stubborn. She keeps her dreams in her hands.

            It’s rainy. Oh the buckets of rain, the buckets of rain.

            I’m not working today. Had a little picnic. A handful of us, friends and family. We ate inside the brand new pole barn. The sheet metal roof screamed with the sheets of rain. It was abeautiful picnic.

            But Lindsey wouldn’t come in. She was stewing in the buckets of rain, hashing it out with the limp-necked tractor whose engine had gone caput. Earlier, she had been mowing thistle in a valley. For those of you not familiar, thistle’s a spiteful dinosaur of a plant. It grows ten feet, and pierces even cowhide. It’s purple flowers (budding they look like a dog’s penis) spread its seeds like conquistadores across the prairie.

            Pesto pasta, chicken, frittata, Italian bread, wine, beer, tomato fresh mozzarella salad, carrot cake. Lindsey wasn’t coming in. She breathed her life into the wounded tractor, and subsisted on half an avocado and a piece of bread.  

            A faded blue Ford tractor. Cute as a button with a grimace and twenty three horse power. Turned out, some stray barbed wire managed to curl around the tractor’s mowing blades, seizing the mower, the Ford, the thistle initiative, and Lindsey’s mood.

            Curse the stars, and stink up the heavens. Lindsey keeps her dreams, plowing, seized, broken, fixing, inside the buckets of rain, and in shovels of sun the same, always in her hands, muddy, greasy, tired, thirsty, and content. Lindsey Morris Carpenter is stubborn.