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51 That Was Then Notes from a Sodbuster’s Wife, Kansas,1868 Peter Ludwin What really got us in the end— we women who didn’t make it, who withered and blew away in the open— was the wind. Space, yes, and distance, too, from neighbors, a piano back in Boston. But above all, the wind. In our letters it shrieks hysteria from sod huts, vomits women prematurely undone by loneliness, boils up off the horizon to suck dry their desire as it flattened the stubborn grasses. Not convinced? Scan the photographs, grainy and sepia-toned, like old leather. Study our bony forms in plain black dresses, our mouths drawn tight as a saddle cinch, accusation leaking from rudderless eyes, betrayed. I tried. Lord knows I tried. Survived the locusts and even snakes that fell from the ceiling at night, slithering between us in bed. I dreamed of water, chiffon, the smell of dead leaves banked against a rotting log. I heard opera, carriage wheels on cobblestone. Cried and beat my fists raw into those earthen walls. The wind. Even as it scoured the skin it flayed the soul, 52 A Face to Meet the Faces that raked, pitted shell. And how like the Cheyenne, appearing, disappearing, no fixed location, not even a purpose one could name. ...

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