THE NARRATIVE ARC
An Afternoon With the Rain and the Ghost of My Grandfather
The rain and the promises keep their own sweet time
My grandfather was born in 1914 on the family farm and the life there was soon ground into him like the loam on his bare feet.
He worked the fields and the stock as he grew up and though he ultimately made his living in a suit and a tie, farming was always a part of him.
I once bought him a Stan Rogers CD featuring the song “The Field Behind the Plow”. Rogers had a remarkable talent for getting into the heart of people’s lives and stories, and his stoic portrayal of the farmer’s hard life — told against the backdrop of plowing a field in the face of an approaching storm — resonated with my grandfather. He and my grandmother took a car trip out west with my parents shortly after he received that CD and he just about wore them and the CD out.
In the song, the farmer matches his row-by-row progress in the field behind his roaring tractor with the progress of the storm clouds. The music and memories of my grandfather ran through my head Sunday afternoon as I carved rows of my own across my lawn while my tractor roared.
The sky had been overcast and the clouds were lowering even before I started mowing…
