“Midwest Scenery” from “Remembering Eternity”
“The Midwest revealed itself as an endless series of farms: vast fields of corn, soybeans, and alfalfa spread even and green over hundreds of acres. In a far corner of the expansive fields squatted a two-story, white-clapboard farmhouse on whose square-columned porch sat a rocking chair and beside it, a swing attached by chains to the ceiling of the porch. Fifty yards from the house, an old, creaky, wooden windmill, with vanes like the petals of a huge moribund daisy, but with a shovel-shaped tail behind the flower, surmounted a structure that looked like an oil derrick. Seventy-five yards from the farmhouse, on its other side, a great barn rose three stories high. Its siding consisted of the same white boards used on the main house, but, in this instance, arranged vertically. Big sliding doors, capable of allowing for the entry of combine harvesters, cultivators, plows, seeders, and spreaders, took up most of the front surface of the building. A bushy 200-year-old mockernut hickory tree and a massive red oak nearly as wide as it was high grew respectively near the house and out by the barn.”
