Watchfulness in Fountain County, and: Sunday Morning

GITZEN 53 JULIAN GITZEN WATCHFULNESS IN FOUNTAIN COUNTY Most who use this gravel road are seen: this morning, our seat-straddling mailman, as usual, driving too fast; then a neighbor with tractor and hayrake, overtaken by the red Farm Bureau tank truck; finally, at dusk the village barber bringing corn to his brood sows. I was replacing floor boards in the crib; probably none of them saw me. In deep evening lingering in the barnlot, I hear from a mile north across still fields the engines of Friday traffic on 234 and trace there the tiny headlights of cars whose passengers are less aware of me than of the thick, damp, shoulder-grass bent in the rush of their passing. Few will ever find our gravel road. Behind me another mile to the south a long timberline that rises from the river is fading into night and easy to ignore as I turn to wash up for supper. There among wild hardwoods animals sniff, listen, are interested, perhaps, in our kitchen light, as they hesitate toward grain fields, orchard, garden, where again tonight they need to be unseen. 54 THEMINNESOTA REVIEW SUNDAY MORNING From our porch we watch newly-weaned pigs playfully nip each others' ears. In the next lot their mothers push and quarrel for a cool bed against the water tank. Far too tall now for another cultivation, a block of corn walls in the house yard, bordered by soybeans thickening towards the centers of rows. In the lane's shade cows heavy with calf lift their feet and switch their tails at flies. Relaxed (the only creatures on holiday), we approve the July heat's enlargement of our holdings, heedless that what we intended now surrounds us, growing out of our control. REG SANER ALL-PURPOSE MILITARY EPITAPH "What's the season?" Don't ask me. I lost. From here on my job dips down to two wind-simple things-making promises never to do it again, and keeping them. ...