It's raining.
The smell of warm, damp earth rises from the roadside and fills the car. Through the windows, the mottled brown and green fields spread out into dips and troughs and the occasional bump, punctuated by ramshackle wooden sheds with rusting sheet-metal roofs. Some trees are brown and have started shedding their leaves, others offer a pale yellow-orange, and the majority remain a dusty green. Nothing to rival the splendid colors of the Northeast.
Every once in a while, a familiar metal bird can be seen standing guard in a field, though fewer and fewer are engaged in their rhythmic dance to pump the black gold from the ground. In the air, one of their feathered cousins loops and twirls, long yellow tail flittering in the wind.
The road ahead and back glistens and vanishes in a faint haze of raindrops in the distance.
We could be going anywhere, and it wouldn't matter. Sometimes, Texas seems like a perpetual scenery.
The smell of warm, damp earth rises from the roadside and fills the car. Through the windows, the mottled brown and green fields spread out into dips and troughs and the occasional bump, punctuated by ramshackle wooden sheds with rusting sheet-metal roofs. Some trees are brown and have started shedding their leaves, others offer a pale yellow-orange, and the majority remain a dusty green. Nothing to rival the splendid colors of the Northeast.
Every once in a while, a familiar metal bird can be seen standing guard in a field, though fewer and fewer are engaged in their rhythmic dance to pump the black gold from the ground. In the air, one of their feathered cousins loops and twirls, long yellow tail flittering in the wind.
The road ahead and back glistens and vanishes in a faint haze of raindrops in the distance.
We could be going anywhere, and it wouldn't matter. Sometimes, Texas seems like a perpetual scenery.
3 comments:
I assumed your metal birds were what I know as a nodding donkey (though I've only ever seen one in the UK). So I looked up nodding donkey and found it had lots of names - "The pumpjack (also known as nodding donkey, pumping unit, horsehead pump, beam pump, sucker rod pump, grasshopper pump, thirsty bird and jack pump)". I like nodding donkey and thirsty bird best - the latter reminds me of a toy bird you used to be able to get that sat on the edge of a glass and nodded backwards and forwards.
As always yours was a beautifully written piece of text - you are wasted on the sciences!!!
On the contrary, CJ, perhaps in L'Archiduchesse we have the next C P Snow - well, sort of. Imagine it. A scientist writing beautiful prose about her science.
Oops. Sorry to be rude talking about you in front of you - so to speak - Archiduchesse.
I didn't know Snow was a scientist - you live and learn.
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