American Gothic by Grant Wood 1930
She didn’t ask for much. A smile, a touch–a little love and tenderness to shift the close of a dirt and scrabble day.
First year married drifted by on a breeze of hope and expectation. There was work to be done. Hard work, but worth the blisters raised as they dug a life out of rough earth; grew the wheat to make the bread they hoped would sustain them.
Second and third years married passed in a flurry of motion building on the first. More earth to till, more grain, more sweat. An arch of eyebrow, a sigh. No babies planted, but years stretched out ahead of them. There was time yet for that.
The farm grew in acres. Middling trees marked the borders of all they owned. She made curtains from her bridal veil and hung them in the window of the room where a child would one day sleep.
Four years swept by, then five, six, seven. They bought a tractor when she wanted a crib.
The tenth year saw a drought.
It rained through much of the eleventh year. The silo was replaced.
Year fifteen a barren womb dried up and was removed. Hope shriveled to a useless thing.
The seventeenth year she set a potted plant out on the front porch and tried to put her faith in that.
Disappointment etched lines between her brows. She left the curtains hanging in the upstairs room. The lace had come all the way from France.
It would make a fine shroud–all she wished for now.
n.b. Writing prompt by Visual Verse. While my friends were dancing, I sat in a corner and came up with this. Don’t ask me why. Muses don’t have to have a reason.
A Wilderness of Words 