In Their Grasp

Why does a clover field in Brookfield, Wisconsin, hold such good memories? Was it because rolling in fields with sweet red clover smell clinging to my jeans, and silky leaves cool against my breath represents a time I felt purely safe, free, unencumbered by life’s unpredictability? Was it because Bill and Marsh and I could spread out and roll our bodies through it, laughing and hiding from parents and sisters as we pressed the fluffy stalks flat with our bodies, arms held tight to our sides, creating rooms and connecting corridors in clover so fresh I can still feel it gliding against my cheek, can still taste gulps of green, thick and tangy?      

This was my Midwest: a land of rolling hills, bluffs, streams, a hundred trees by kid-count and ten-thousand lakes by slogan-count; a place with rocky driveways, trails for hikers and my sisters’ horses, insects all you don’t want, thunderstorms that rumbled and grumbled with noises that couldn’t have come from heaven but from somewhere underneath, darker. I grew up in a place where homesteads were far apart, but small towns knew your name, where gun clubs and carnivals co-existed in Sunny Hill, Illinois, and where, at hamburger stands called The Clock near Coal Valley, your dad could buy his family ten hamburgers for a dollar in 1954.