Weeding Nebraska (Essay)

A toe-headed five year old in the western Nebraska town of Scottsbluff, I was daily found wedging myself into stacked piles of hay. Or looking out the second story window of my family’s farmhouse at all the dark skinned workers picking beets in the fields. I often balanced myself along a stretch of road behind our barn, trying to stay inside the soggy tracks left by trucks and rainwater, pretending I was a gymnast.

Life in Nebraska was rich with Frisbee games and worried sicknesses over kitties whose skin hatched maggots and later died. Upstairs in the bedroom I shared with my brother, bees built a nest in the ceiling above his bed and one day the crash we heard from downstairs crammed our home full of its angry occupants. We took flight through the front screen-covered porch, past the maggoty kitties; a bee tornado underway.

It was my regular chore to weed the front garden, surrounded by crops. It must not have seemed a big deal to grown ups. But to me that plot of twenty rows might have stretched for miles and I made the most of spending my afternoons experimenting with potato bugs, tomato worms, and peas.

I hunkered and stared into the sky, and found there was an awfully surprising lot of things going on up there.

The sky is Nebraska’s commodity, trumped only by corn and beets. There is so much sky that when a boy looks around half his experience is blue. It is filled with powdered sugar lumps and streams of coffee crème in the daytime. At night, it is decorated with glittery sequins when you squint just right, making sparkles dance around inside your eyelashes until your eyes water up and you have to wipe.

There were usually crisscrossing trails of smoke that looked like pipe cleaners frayed on one end. A tiny speck of a plane led at the front of the trail, filled with important people. I wondered if they were going somewhere from Omaha and I knew they were important and rich. My friend had once drawn a plane with people jumping out. I wondered if I would ever see people jumping out of a plane into my garden.

I wondered where a plane might take me. How did it feel? Were the people nice? Could I go to China in one instead of drilling a hole all the way there? As I grew, the silliness of flying and pipe cleaners dimmed and I forgot about it.

Until last spring.

Twenty-eight years had come and gone with idealized memories of my time in Nebraska. My sister was born there. My father started preaching there. I started kindergarten there.

It was still a soft memory every time I flew across middle America from New York to San Francisco and back. On the airplane I noted on the satellite tracking system that Scottsbluff was a marker chosen to show passengers a trip's progress. Why did they choose that little town to represent such a huge segment of the states? Why not the state capital? Scottsbluff is a blink of a town. Every time I deplaned in San Francisco, I vowed to revisit the little place. The town that gobbled up my dad’s capacity for independent thinking. The town where the third child in our family was born.

In that town I coaxed a little Mexican girl across the alley to take off her shirt for me. There was nothing there but little buds, of course, being five or six years old. Corky, an eighth grade boy across the street would push me around in my purple wagon, tirelessly letting me do brodies in the gravel driveway. We made paper baskets and filled them with lilacs on May Day so we could go hang them on the doors of old ladies, ring the bell, and run off to hide, watch, and giggle at our goodness.

The alley between our houses was filled with large gravel and served one Easter as the cement factory to our jelly bean-emptied dump trucks. That is until a real dump truck came through and honked us straight out of our imaginary cement plant.