Shortly after the time Marconi began his famous radio transmissions, my grandmother as a young girl was still on horseback for supplies at the small general store. Situated at the crossroads of a Swedish settlement in Iowa
As I grew up, my grandmother recounted these tales of my family as they were passed down to her but the basis of her own existence as a little girl was modern: riding a horse into town for supplies was better than walking. And she knew stories of hardship. Even before the homes were staked, the first winter was severe and early, forcing her ancestors to dig caves into the hillsides for shelter.
She lived in between two centuries, to the age of 103 and was lucky enough to see the memorial of the immigrants’ community in its ghost-town form of Calliope Village
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at the end of her burial day as
the wind cut through the switchgrass,
a soot-black suit carried forward
the muted explorations of a cobweb-rattled
stable from one hundred years ago.
steeped in molasses-soaked barley, the sweat
of a horse under cracked leather tack
drifts through the homesteader’s air on a calliope song
long gone across the tracks to the empty side of town.
clouds of dust ripple out like marconi’s waves on the
gravel road as she meditates in the saddle to the clopping
hooves of her four-legged ride.
a stone-ground loaf of bread waits on the sill,
baked for her by the shopkeep’s boy at the grey clapboard
store facing north near the church and cemetery where
her great grandfather Ring lowered the
dead and softly sang their praise:
swedish hymns to the tenders of the prairie
and the harmonies they knew in the dust, rough-milled grain
and the holes dug into the winter ground.
I learned these ballads at her side in this four-cornered
churchyard where the sandstones lean distilled through
time and I quietly now sing out my goodbyes
to the girl with her warm bread and
long-stride friend as they fade down the road
to their far place in the foothills of the past.
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