(CREATIVE NONFICTION)
SILO RISING
CHRISTIE TATE
SILO RISING
CHRISTIE TATE
From the flat line of pasture, the silo towered over the barns made of wood that weathered to gray after the first winter. It held the grain of the season for the mouths of the country. Cylinder symbol of bounty, the silo was a siren that beckoned us back each year to this corner of Texas where the dark fecund earth teemed with a promise to yield a bumper crop this year because we burned the back field last January. The charred land vowed to give birth to new shoots come early June under the watchful gaze of the silo standing tall.
You could see it on the eastern horizon, some forty-five miles south of Dallas’s mohawk skyline of jagged gleaming buildings reaching toward the sun bleached sky above. On I-35, as you neared the Forreston exit, if you squinted hard—hard enough that you see only a sliver of the world between the fringed curtains of your lashes—you could make it out, the obelisk of the prairie, the monument erected for the glory of grist.
The silo soared above us, higher than Grandma’s yellow two-story farmhouse. My brother knitted his fingers so I could step into them and peek through a hole three feet above my head. Inside, I surveyed the stray hay, loose bits of wire, and corn cob carcasses. It smelled of earth gone slightly sour. In a family myth, Grandma, returning from an errand in town one day, spied my Daddy and his little sister walking the rim of the silo. They’d climbed up the wrought iron ladder never meant for their scrabbling feet. Might as well have been the edge of the moon to Grandma’s frightened eyes. In each telling, the children grew younger and Grandma’s panic swelled higher. The neighbors two farms over stopped their chores when Grandma’s cries, carried by the wind, rippled across the land. Between the myth and the truth lies my flesh-and-blood kin. By the time I was born a great-grandchild of this dark, rich soil, the silo’s walls were smooth as tusks, the ladder long removed.
Next fall, when the Harvest moon famously shines from the late September sky, the silo will turn one hundred years old. For a century it has guarded the slice of the Lone Star State that once belonged to my family. Great-granddaddy bought it for a song from a farmer who was sick of the heat, beat down by the wind, and bested by the bankers’ ledgers.
On a rainy morning in a coastal city thousands of miles away, I look up a satellite image of that dusty pocket of land that lives forever in the marrow of my memory. The acres slipped from our hands when debt forced a sale to a taciturn radiologist and his Houston-born wife. The image loads: scarred earth where the A-frame hayloft once stood, the bone-white creek bed ringing the property like a crooked necklace, and hopeful green grass sprouting up around the concrete slabs from the old milk barn. I see the footprint of a farm, a family, a way of life. The silo still stands, empty as a dry well. The prairie winds gust through its belly on their way across the country. From above, its dark wide center looks like an eye peering deep into the earth and far into the past. I feel the urge to bow my head and say a prayer of gratitude that it remains, that it once was ours, and that I remember how it felt to place my small palm on its smooth stone walls.
You could see it on the eastern horizon, some forty-five miles south of Dallas’s mohawk skyline of jagged gleaming buildings reaching toward the sun bleached sky above. On I-35, as you neared the Forreston exit, if you squinted hard—hard enough that you see only a sliver of the world between the fringed curtains of your lashes—you could make it out, the obelisk of the prairie, the monument erected for the glory of grist.
The silo soared above us, higher than Grandma’s yellow two-story farmhouse. My brother knitted his fingers so I could step into them and peek through a hole three feet above my head. Inside, I surveyed the stray hay, loose bits of wire, and corn cob carcasses. It smelled of earth gone slightly sour. In a family myth, Grandma, returning from an errand in town one day, spied my Daddy and his little sister walking the rim of the silo. They’d climbed up the wrought iron ladder never meant for their scrabbling feet. Might as well have been the edge of the moon to Grandma’s frightened eyes. In each telling, the children grew younger and Grandma’s panic swelled higher. The neighbors two farms over stopped their chores when Grandma’s cries, carried by the wind, rippled across the land. Between the myth and the truth lies my flesh-and-blood kin. By the time I was born a great-grandchild of this dark, rich soil, the silo’s walls were smooth as tusks, the ladder long removed.
Next fall, when the Harvest moon famously shines from the late September sky, the silo will turn one hundred years old. For a century it has guarded the slice of the Lone Star State that once belonged to my family. Great-granddaddy bought it for a song from a farmer who was sick of the heat, beat down by the wind, and bested by the bankers’ ledgers.
On a rainy morning in a coastal city thousands of miles away, I look up a satellite image of that dusty pocket of land that lives forever in the marrow of my memory. The acres slipped from our hands when debt forced a sale to a taciturn radiologist and his Houston-born wife. The image loads: scarred earth where the A-frame hayloft once stood, the bone-white creek bed ringing the property like a crooked necklace, and hopeful green grass sprouting up around the concrete slabs from the old milk barn. I see the footprint of a farm, a family, a way of life. The silo still stands, empty as a dry well. The prairie winds gust through its belly on their way across the country. From above, its dark wide center looks like an eye peering deep into the earth and far into the past. I feel the urge to bow my head and say a prayer of gratitude that it remains, that it once was ours, and that I remember how it felt to place my small palm on its smooth stone walls.
Christie Tate is a former Texan who now lives and writes in Chicago. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times (Modern Love), Hippocampus, The Pithead Chapel, The Washington Post, Nailed Magazine, and others.