I hold stories in the weft and weave of sturdy canvas threads. Stories from your grandfather and his step-father, from your father and mother, stories from your own lips. Also, from others, family by blood and shared experience. Stories you might tell your children if you could only tease them out, separate the details from the laden fabric of history and receding memory.
I hold also the fading stains of antelope blood, the scent of stew meat simmered long over propane stoves, the light of spring, summer, and fall suns, the dusky smoke and glow of campfires. I have stood in gale force winds, sudden rains, and heavy snows. When I grew weary and thin, an oiled tarp and new canvas stitched me strong again. New layers laid down atop the old, obscuring some of what was, metamorphosis a necessity of perpetuity.
What you have seen, so have I, the generations of Wyoming kin shaped by sage and sky. I know the hills of Old Carbon and Hanna and of the Red Desert. Raise me up still in that country, straighten the splintery ridgepole, string the guy wires taut, set me to catch the wind and hold to earth.
Summer has come to the high plains. Cool still, and rainy most afternoons here in Laramie for the last month. But it seems as if over night, the town has turned lush. The lawns are green and studded with yellow dandelions, the trees are laden with bright leaves and purple and white blossoms, and the mountains hang blue and snow-capped in the distance. The skies have been full drama, great mounds of white clouds shaded blue and gray across their bellies that darken to black in the afternoons and bring the smell of fresh rain, and, often, rain itself, sometimes rumbling thunder. The snow is just coming down from the high country, and already the rivers have lapped beyond their banks. The air is redolent with lilacs, mown grass, water on pavement and stone.
Of course, this turn to summer did not happen overnight. I’ve been watching for it for weeks, months. But no matter how closely I watch the buds on the trees and earliest spring flowers and the hints of green at the base of bunch grass, the wash of color that is spring and early summer always takes me off guard, feels like it arrives in a rush. I open my curtain one morning and catch my breath, step outside, feel the sun, hang my jacket back on a hook.
I don’t want to miss one moment of the spring, hungry as I am for it after a long winter. Part of me wishes it would stay like this forever. I know it won’t. In the last few days, I’ve slapped my first mosquitoes. With all this wet, more will come. Like most of the American West, we’ve already experienced days of murky smoke, born down from massive Canadian wildfires. I know that wet springs can lead to more fires, especially if the rain burns away to a dry July and August. I know that even in mild summers, the high desert and prairie will burnish golden and brown as the days spin by. I know that I will wish for frost come September, when the land is going to seed and my allergies flare.
But for now, I try to soak in all the green and blue and splashes of yellow, red, white, and purple I can. Out at the barn along the Little Laramie, the wild irises began blooming just last week. Their’s is a short season. Always in the first few weeks of June, always over by the end of the month. I wonder if I would tire of them if they stood year round. I don’t think so. But their brevity makes me more aware of them, of the changing seasons they herald. And I am glad, and grateful, every time I see them pushing up through wet spring grass.
