Watching the Seasons

Watching the Seasons

Him being more your uncle than mine, you’re close kin and me only poor relations, I thought it best you talk first when he began about his property, leaving a will, what would happen to the land.

Imagine you’d be thinking about horses. You aways been talking about them since you were little. Playing horses. Dreaming horses. Talking horses and living on a farm.
I wasn’t thinking about anything. Coming back and Janie being gone. I didn’t like to think about past or future, they both hurt, so I left them alone.

We signed up together right after she got out of high school. I was a year behind
and quit. So we were GI Joe and GI Jane. Come back in a couple of years, have some money, get a place. Maybe she’d go to school. I’d need a job, farm on the side for us.

We coulda been a commercial on the TV. High school sweethearts off to war, except Janie got killed. Some fool Lieutenant got them all blown up and not half of her come home. Not from the weight of that government rubber bag.

Knew you’d take more than you should from your uncle, but not in a thieving way.
More than your share, is all. You best move in now. Learn your way around, and
no lie, he needs the help.

I’ll stay on, you want. Keep to myself, and watch the seasons.
Hard sometimes, trying to forget and remember at the same time.

Doug Mathewson

Elvie

Elive

Well, huh…. Well, I’d have to say it was back when we were trying to be rodeo
stars, say the second summer of the three. If you wasn’t getting drunk every night and raising hell you’d be looking for something else to do so I started going to these services they got in the back of a big old storage trailer. The guy, Reverend Bob, or Pastor Joe, or what ever the jimmy cakes he called himself back then, would talk about leading a good life, a Christian life, just a life of doing right by others. The Golden Rule and all that. Not that campfire Jesus shit my Daddy always warned against, just being honest owning up to how you carry yourself in this life. So Bob would talk some and pray some, then maybe try and get a old time hymn going.
Remember this one time, well more than the one, somebody started in talking about this reincarnation business, how it was different than the resurrection of our Lord and a different thing too than all the saved folks rising up in the final days.
Said you come back, but not as you was, or even close. Maybe as somebody else
or an animal depending. There were a fair share of jokes about who’d be what,
till I don’t recall who took offense. Some of the boys liked the idea of a second chance at things, then one old hand pointed out us being runaway farm boys, rodeo trash, and day labor we’d do all the same stupid shit all over again.
So at these trailer prayer meeting, she’d be helping out. She was just a kid back then and this would have been late for her. I remember over her pajamas she wore an apron with twin Dutch girls holding watering cans. Her mother had some sympathies with what Reverend Bobby so she and her girl, the two of them, they’d ladle out pink lemonade while the good Reverend would call for a blessing from above. That lemonade hit the spot for sure, being hot in the trailer and all, but yeah, it was all them years back, the first time I saw my Elvie.

Doug Mathewson