in Ohio, Mother hung our laundry humming, clothespins in her mouth
in Texas, she made my father buy a dryer after angry wet sheets whopped her face more than one blustery afternoon
scarcely a score before Panhandle winds were often roiling clouds, black as charcoal, laying waste to everything that grew and breathed
old men at the feed store talked about the dusters from back then and about every drop of rain, every white flake that fell
I missed going barefoot and fast learned to hate goat heads, and all thorny things that thrived in that flat land
Mother despised the hot winds almost as much as the cool stares she got from the church women whenever she opened her mouth, revealing she wasn't one of them
Mother ended words with “ing,” the extra consonant considered superfluous at best, blasphemous to some
men and women both sounded to me like they had grist from the silos in their mouths
my father had lived there as a boy, swore he would never return the dreaded dust still clinging to his clothes when he left for the war
oil money brought him back but only long enough for his skull to be cracked dead by hard pipe
his insurance settlement bought us a place in the Buckeye State as quick as the lid flapped shut on our mailbox
Mother wept little until our first night back in Ohio, when a blizzard knocked out the lights, and our two candles burned flat in the cold
my uncle brought bread, butter and warm soup, which we ate in the gloom while Mother told my father's favorite brother how much we loved the Texas sun