Among the Pines

A futuristic story, located in a Wyoming County, NY small town. (In Wyoming County, NY, it is said there are more cows than people.)

 

AMONG THE PINES

 

 

 

 

 

 

    “Hi Gramma” and a smiling face peeks ‘round the room divider.  “Oh hello Dahlia…” It is only my granddaughter.  I don’t think I’ve ever gotten used to being called Grandma; it always makes me feel so old.  “They haven’t decided how long they will keep me in here. I have to wait for the Doctor to make his rounds…to get around to seeing me again.  That’s always how it’s been.  I’ll be okay.”  Dahlia is telling me about the college she is going to, but my mind is elsewhere, as it always seems to be these days.

 

    On the way to the hospital, I watched the world race by, my mind wild.  Our skyline looks so odd to me, even now, remembering the beautiful farmland and old houses spaced far apart…where now buildings stab high into the sky like a giant’s jaws devouring the farmland of the past.  Half of the farmland is still here, only hidden, amongst the tall angular metallic buildings.  Now we watch the sunset only as it mirrors off the rows of tiny windows where the world sleeps. 

 

    For some time, I have loved to sneak away to that hidden no-man’s land.  A bit of it was once mine and I was a constant servant to care for it.  It gave me that needed feeling of importance…a responsibility my grandchildren are missing in their lives.  I suppose that’s why I ramble on and on about “the good old days” like I do.  Don’t want those days or our ways to die with me. 

 

    Dahlia’s visit was a surprise.  She has been away at a new girls’ college in Albany.  The oldest of my grandchildren, her name suits her well.  She tells me she is still growing her namesake flowers in the tabletop greenhouse I gave her last Christmas.  I know she reads even more voraciously than I do and I have been told she paints beautiful scenery on anything and everything she can.  Sometimes I feel I am looking at myself reborn while I am still here.  Gave me a very special small wooden box for my 75^th birthday, graced with a scene painted from an old photo. 

 

    Dahlia explains a class she is taking is all about flowers, how experts are trying to re-establish some of the disappearing old flower varieties…so as to preserve them for generations to come.  It seems the hybrid varieties of my youth are not doing so well these days.  I remember the wildflowers being crowded out by parking lots roads and driveways paved.  No one listened to environmentalists in those days; now no one listens to anyone but the conservationists. 

 

    My granddaughter sometimes listens so intently to these stories that cloud my eyes.  Dahlia must know, today, that I have much on my mind.  She actually wants to know about my asthma; she is worried, but I don’t really want to talk about me so I talk about what’s been on my mind.  “I still remember the day the first story broke.  Oil companies and auto manufacturers had been caught in the act.  Rigging research projects on environmental illnesses away from any real answers.  They had been at it for years.”

 

    “I had never understood why, in our modern world, more was not known about asthma and allergies.  I got my answer back in 2005.  Soon after, we got a new President and a new way of life.  Just like that.  Everyone had to accept the changes, and there were a lot of them to be made.”  We were seeing more clearly how we had upset the delicate balance of our human bodies.  It was decided we had upset the delicate balance of our environmental world for too long and maybe we should attempt to repair some of the damage.  

 

    “Lawnmowers and gasoline engines were outlawed, so, if there had not already been a trend towards parking lots and little tiny lawns and patios, there soon was.  All methods of transportation had to be adapted to the new energy requirements and pollution control laws immediately.  Government funding was skimmed off everything else to pay for these sudden needs.  Within a couple years, there were more research findings and slowly our heads had to come down out of the clouds.  Processed food companies and artificial anything went bankrupt, one at a time.  As a country, we needed to take back control of our health.” 

 

    Now I sit here staring at my hospital meal in wonder…a small chicken breast, cooked broccoli, fresh pear, wheat bread, butter, milk (with fat), and good cold water.  “I never could get used to products like white bread and processed “cheese food” anyways.  I would just stare at them and wonder if I really wanted what was IN them IN me.” 

 

    Dahlia just laughs, saying they never teach the interesting part of the truth in her history classes.  They never have...  I finish up my meal and the nurse comes again to do more tests.  Dahlia just sits patiently waiting to talk to me again.  I am getting tired but I go on.  I don’t want to disappoint her.  “Immigration was at an all time high.  There was a trend towards moving north where the seasons could still be enjoyed.  Over the years, as the more northern cities began to burst at their seams, rather than lose every inch of the valuable farmland to housing, a compromise was had and the building developments went higher instead of wider.  It started in the suburbs, when people started moving away from the cities.  I never thought I’d see the day in Perry, but I did.” 

 

    “People discovered what a nice community we had, in Perry, and our village began to boom.  The dairy industry continued to expand, as it always had.  The population grew at an alarming rate.  Some of our farmland birthed a new breed of scary metal creatures, rising to cities’ heights.” 

 

    “Wasn’t Grandpa in the dairy business? He used to tell me the funniest stories about the cows escaping their fences.” Dahlia startled me for a second.  I was lost in my memories but she brought me back.  “Grandpa and his stories.  Yes, we lived on a farm when your father was very young.  Your dad liked to let the cows lick his tiny fingers with their tickly sandpaper tongues.  Sometimes the cows would run right through the electric fence.  Wake up with cows in the yard, cows in the road, cows pretty much everywhere and have to get them back inside.  Sounds simple, but it never really was.”

 

   “Grandpa would tell me when they bred the cows to give more milk, they bred the intelligence right out of them.  To get them back in the pasture, we had to run around fooling them that we were the fence…arms widespread…fencing them in until they went back “home”.  Chasing them never really worked.  We had to fool them.”  I let my voice trail off… Things have quite changed since those days.  Now they still say we have more cows than people in our county.  Imagine that.  That’s a lot of cows.  I don’t know where they fit them all.

 

    “A few years back, they put the cows up in these new facilities of tall wide buildings with elaborate mazes of pipelines in-between them.  From what I hear, the cows’ “living quarters” remind me of the old automatic car washes of yesteryear.  We still need milk, after all, and the milk production technicians in our county are still on the ball after all these years.  Everything is very clean neat technical computerized.  The milk and products are pasteurized and packaged on site, so there is no extra transportation cost or pollution.  We even get really cheap electricity out of the whole operation! They don’t waste anything.  The cows’ byproducts are broken down, used to make electricity…then piped over to another building stacked with indoor corn and hay fields like a layer cake.”

 

    “The remaining farmland is not used for growing crops anymore.  Years ago, farmers were forced to move their crop harvesting indoors, by the DEC, who then planted trees over their old farmland.  The DEC is hoping this will help to maintain our atmospheric oxygen levels for many generations.  Imagine if farmers had known they would do this to their land, after they spent much effort at ridding themselves of those annoying “hedge rows”!”

 

    We grow our world taller every day.  What will we do if we reach the clouds? Is that high enough? When does it stop…I wonder to myself, as I sit up in my small bed on the 33^rd floor of the William H. Perry Hospital.  Dahlia was just leaving.  I know they have the air comfort-controlled in here, but a part of me wishes to have my feet on the ground, to feel free, to be free.

 

    “You’re getting a roommate,” a nurse calls in to me, and I am reminded of my very first hospital stay.  Now I am the old woman roommate and a young girl is wheeled in.  But I still have the window seat.  My attention is on my window, with its false-view shade between its panes of glass; I want to see what is really there.  The nurse comes in, “Did you call me, sweetie?” “Yes,” I say, “does this shade raise?”  She smiles and tells me she will see if the Doctor says it is okay.  “No one ever asks us anymore,” she apologizes just before she scurries away, and I wonder what she thinks of me.               

 

    I am reading “Beauties Thieves”, yet another wonderful novel by Emma Rheeves, and I drift off to sleep.  Another time appears to me…

I am sitting in a flower field.  The sky is blue, not a cloud in the sky,

the way I used to paint my skies, casting aside my art teacher’s evil eye. 

Warm dry air circles,

giant pines whisper to the sun

“come out, come out, come out”,

hiding rays peek through

long spiny fingers of

never-ending tree tops

rising to touch the sky—

ah, the glory of the pine

so gorgeous in its time.

 

    BEEP, Beep, beep, I am jarred awake.  My heart races.  My new neighbor must have set off her IV alarm again.  Or maybe it was me.  Oh, the beauty.  The bright sun is peeking through before my old eyes, and ah, the glory of the pines: Tall glassy buildings rise to the sky as far as I can see high, grasping.  “Come out, come out, come out,” I whisper to myself only and I smile.