EarlyBoon

We fell in together at the end of a long ragged week. I’d made it through the river, though it had started flooding when I was half way through, and so I had nearly been lost with my horse down the river.  As it was, I was soaked to the bone and cold when my horse, Starstruck, and I had dragged ourselves out, downriver from the intended ford and bruised from the rocks we’d hit.  We pulled ourselves out of the lowlands around the river bed and struggled up into the highland, the prairie proper.  Here the sun was hot and there was a warm wind blowing, so I spread out my wet gear and foodstuffs, set Starstruck on a picket line, and then lay down in the warm grass to rest. I never quite fell asleep, so I heard the horse and rider approaching, and was up and had my hand near my hidden pistol by the time the rider greeted me. He, like myself, wore a broad-brimmed hat and a buttoned up flannel shirt. Unlike me, he didn’t wear a separated skirt, but that was to be expected. He tipped his

She looked at the seeds with a speculative eye. This year was the first year in a long time that she felt up to going full tilt into garden planning. She even felt like maybe she could do her own starts instead of buying the pricey ones at the local greenhouse.  She had only enough money to buy the seeds and potting soil though. For the containers, she'd use the collected egg cartons she'd saved over the past few months. So she looked over the seeds. Green peppers, for sure, some cucumbers, basil, eggplant, peas, beans and lettuce. There were more, and she picked out the ones she wanted, with hope for the future. Planting the seeds was an exercise in hope; planting for the unseen future. She buried the seeds in their warm earthen beds and watered them. She placed them in the sunshine and waited. And waited. She watered faithfully and waited. And then one day, little green leaves started to poke their heads above the soil, stretching up toward the sunshine, moving out of their

The piano started its life in a factory, in upper state New York. Manufacturing had been getting more efficient and materials easier to come by, so the piano and all its created kin were completed on the regular. This particular plant made upright pianos, their strings, cousins to the harps, strung and tightened, encased upright in heavy wood panelling and decorative scrollwork. The keys had lacquered faux ivory glued to them, and the black and white keys glistened. This particular piano was bought, fresh and new, by an enterprising family who had recently moved back from overseas. The piano didn’t know how much it cost, nor how it came to live where it did, but it was loaded into a wagon pulled by horses, and moved from the cold of the factory into a crowded home, filled with warmth and human voices.  Fingers, older and nimble, or young and stumbling, played the keys. Sometimes gently, sometimes not. Years passed and the tarnish faded a little on the scrollwork, but the voice of the