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You were born in 1923 to Texas farmers.
You lived through the Great Depression, and eventually managed to get yourself into WWII as a nurse with your mother when you were 17 years old.
However, as the war progressed, there...
This place seems confused by the rules of night and day, or perhaps it simply ignores them, refusing to cool when the sun fades.
It's as if God has not yet decided what this place should become. Will it be desert? Will it be prairie?
Every living thing is armed with horns and fangs as the land wages war on itself, seeking the answer.
I knew that war.
That war between what you should become and what you could become.
I looked at this place, and saw my unfinished soul.
I looked at this place and knew for me, that war was over. I know what I am now.
My imagination was an escape from the real world. Being a young teenage girl growing up on a farm wasn't exactly the best way to raise a young lady, but my parents did their best.
I preferred to wear overalls and ride horses till the sun went down, than wear a tight dress and knit as a pass time.
The dress felt like a prison in a way, built just for me, and other young girls like me.
It choked me by the neck, dug into my underarms, and flattened my breasts against my rib cage. It disguised everything that makes me a woman from the glare of jealous women and rapacious men, as if their lack of self esteem or will power should be my only concern.
I will never live in that world. Where the weak would rather guilt the strong than become strong themselves. No, I will stay in this world, this world doesn't care what the weak want. This world eats the weak.
As I sat on my horse, watching the sunset, I looked across the horizon and seen a flash of smoke billowing into the air. No clouds in sight. No rain.
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I let out a sigh from my heavy chest. It was a wheat field, full of what was supposed to be someone's harvest.
With the Great Depression came the Dust Bowl, which had been raging for 6 years.
When I was younger, such things wouldn't have affected me so much, but as I started to get older, I started to understand the severity of the situation.
Our country was close to collapsing, and it's people were close to starving.
I did not know it at that time, but that would be the last field fire, and the last dry evening before rains began to flood over Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
It was as if God decided to answer all our prayers at once and dump 6 years worth of farmers' blood, sweat, and tears onto the dry prairie.
The day it happened was probably the happiest day of everyone's lives, as we danced out in the rain and splashed in mud puddles, getting so much sand on our bodies, it would take weeks to finally get all of it off. But it was worth the celebration.
