The Llano Estacado

How much soil do you plow to soothe a conscience? If you’re a staked plains, dry-land, long view man: a sky’s worth. Some even sow the dry playa mid-summer with sorghum, the cotton plowed under after early hail. Thus, not every farmer keeps an old broken homestead sacred as a graveyard. Today, no Sharpshin on a pivot for an omen, no stoic farmer on a turn-row changing water. Among a little wind grit, in a grid on a grid, somewhere like the crossroads of outer space and Earth, Texas, a handful of ragged elms withstand a long sway of heat and wind. These old guards of a home haunt the field but wither even as ghosts must. Honor them with a walk among homesick bricks, and prophesy good.