We Must Work on Mother’s Day to Meet the Corporation’s Deadline
Dana Dean
After the tornado scattered Uncle Larry’s farm for miles on Mother’s Day, our parents arrived to do the heavy lifting. They forgot about us, their children, as they strode toward ruin. We wandered among crumpled bulk bins ripped from foundations, tractors overturned with broken windows, empty feed sacks waving in tree branches, insulation strewn across the yard.
We organized. We gave ourselves serious tasks. We plucked coopless chicks from the wet ground and placed them in boxes with straw. We caught loose piglets by back legs and placed them in a makeshift pen.
We grew hungry and tromped to the powerless (yet spared) farmhouse, determined to pop popcorn under the glow of our flashlights. Cousin Elizabeth braided Cousin Lauren’s long hair to pass the time it would take the kernels to pop. Our hopes waned. The glow of a flashlight was not strong enough to bust the kernels white. Our stomachs grumbled. When dusk-pink started to peek through clouds, a neighbor arrived with a box full of cold-cut sandwiches. Our bedraggled mothers walked to the house to collect us and a sandwich before heading home.
Even though we slept, heavy from exhaustion, some of us were tossed from the refuge of sleep by images of twisted steel. Storms still unearth memories of the small farm our parents tried to lift back up.
Our parents knew the weight of farming, lifting the 730 tractor out of the crushed and blooming lilac bush, lifting a dead horse struck through its barrel by a two-by-four, lifting us onto their hips and turning away, shielding us from the scene. They told us it was in our best interests to study—stability existed in books and monthly paychecks—never in the weather, weather that didn’t even observe Mother’s Day.
So we find ourselves, the farm kids of yesterday, animals in confinement. Our feet in clean shoes beneath desks, because our parents warned us. The wail of a weather siren takes us back, makes us wonder if picking up a family farm in the late ’80s from a tornado’s wrath was an act in vain. What would it have meant to leave the pieces strewn about, the animals to roam, because the pieces were never to be ours?
Seasons change outside our office windows. Anti-depressants are covered by healthcare plans. An acre of land sells for $6,000 in Buccan County to an absentee landlord in California. Tractors drive themselves.
The standard issue brown and white office clock reads 4:56 pm—the time we most feel and recognize the aching atrophy of our muscles. We crave their use, to fling open the office exit doors. There is a glitch, however. Our red-faced supervisors herd us into boardrooms at 4:57 pm. The corporation’s new global positioning software is erroneously stamping time. The supervisors hum dissonance with the fluorescent lights that hang above our heads, drone the language of machines. On and on and on they methodically prattle.
Their idle words do not carry the weight we long to lift.
Dana Dean grew up on a pig farm in rural Riverside, Iowa, during the Farm Debt Crisis of the 1980s. The once-struggling family farm has since evolved into an environmentally sustainable Black Angus production ranch, Trails End Angus, which can be followed on Facebook. Dana holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and teaches rhetoric at the University of Iowa. She is currently at work on a collection of linked short stories set in rural, agrarian Iowa from 1980–2016.
Dana Dean grew up on a pig farm in rural Riverside, Iowa, during the Farm Debt Crisis of the 1980s. The once-struggling family farm has since evolved into an environmentally sustainable Black Angus production ranch, Trails End Angus, which can be followed on Facebook. Dana holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and teaches rhetoric at the University of Iowa. She is currently at work on a collection of linked short stories set in rural, agrarian Iowa from 1980–2016.