Age of Optimisim.

Age of Optimisim.

Thick leathery leaves rubbed Grace’s cheek. She reached for the flowery cluster crowning the stalk of prairie dock. It was a mild winter day. Grace grasped the burst of yellow. A sparrow hawk circled above looking for grassy tunnels of shrews. Seeds caught wind as Grace rolled the cluster between her thumb and fingers.

She was not far from Huffman Prairie. There a century earlier, in secret, the Wright brothers compelled six hundred pounds of spruce wood, muslin and aluminum to bank and perform figure eights in the clouds. Above Ohio, flying machines were made to turn.

The wind swept dunes of Kitty Hawk captured public imagination. That was twelve seconds of straight ahead flight. Lessons from a succession of lofty setbacks were learned on the prairie. The brother’s secret of running wire cable from wing tip to rudder was plainly visible. Warped wings stood out in the claim on file in the patent office. The obvious and unnoticed cable provided lateral control for turning. The patent carved out hopes of lucrative war department contracts. The propeller was behind the engine. That position was unreliable and dangerous. The war department looked elsewhere. Nonetheless, their innovations hastened the end of the age of optimism. World war was at hand.

People had a predictable idea of Grace. She had a hard, grainy demeanor. Her eyes were round and hollow. Her limbs were narrow making her knees and elbows seem larger. These features made people underestimate her. People saw her outside of her habitat. Grace’s secrets took root long ago. She felt overshadowed around her sibblings. She quietly began to exploit everyday disturbances. She honed her skills. Grace learned to burn her bridges. She trusted her deep roots would renew her afterward. If not, she migrated elsewhere. She had lived a decade in southeast Ohio. People there thought she was Appalachian, like them.

Huffman Prairie was now an air force base. Many homes and businesses had grown and spread around its perimeter. To Grace, the base drained her prairie of its essential nutrients of space and light. Some years back she established a preserve of wild flowers here. Each spring, she waited until undesirable plants initiated spring growth before her ritual burn. The first opening of sugar maple buds signaled time had arrived. Last spring she had used a can of left over gas. The fumes had spread in the air. The ignited fireball badly singed her hair and eyebrows.

Each winter, like a hawk, Grace took census of the larks, sparrows, bobolinks, squirrels and meadow vole. She admired their resilience. Yearly, the counts confirmed her hopes that the perimeter had not tightened. In fact, the promised trajectory of the region had collapsed. Abandoned paper, cash register and auto assembly plants rusted away. Use of drones in warfare meant the strategic importance of the air force base for weapons systems testing was waning. Grace happily measured this decline. To her, if only the asphalt and concrete could be pulverized then a new equilibrium might take hold. This was cause for optimism. Just beyond her grasp was a split open milkweed pod. Its seeds hanging from silky threads floated away in the air.