Diana Simpson The Cervantes Paradigm
“Look at the all f-ing windmills down here.”
Vivian’s eyes must focus up instead of far far ahead.
“I didn’t sign up for this,” she appeals into the cell phone.
She had signed up for the trip though. Down the Niagara escarpment, passed cow filled hills of Oxford County and west, along the shore of Lake Erie to her home town and the farmlands she grew up on.
“..and don’t give me that crap about ‘Don Quixote as a metaphor’ either or I’ll hang up.
“Shit, they tore down the barn and the trees are all dead…”
Ancient oak, maples and hickory tumble after many years and more storms’ devastation.
A new pod of five more turbines stab her father’s old farm fields.
Behind the farm, ten more wind their way, two miles south to Lake Erie and on up its shores, to the east and west. They meander up through the Windsor-Toronto corridor, on the shores Lake Huron too, guzzling farmland and scenic vistas.
Vivian is lost in the past again, the same place this landscape always put her. The night her father died, fifteen years ago, the heavens tore apart. She lay in her old bedroom listening to what she figured was the re-uniting parents at heaven’s gate somewhere between Heaven and hell.
Right there, below her bedroom window, that night, four hundred and fifty nine sparrows died: their insides dashed to bits when the Eastern gales hit the Elm grove. The local paper said that they had never heard of anything like it. She takes it as a sign that her dead parents were not happy to see each other.
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“I don’t know where to look,” she lied. She knew exactly where to look. She stalls for more time down here, at home, again. ”No I’m not going to be alone, Carol promised to meet me here……okay, Bye, I love you more...”
Her cousin’s ’02 mini-van makes the big round bend that leads to the farm, and she parks beside Vivian. Carol is her cousin and her own age. They spent their childhoods together in the woods surrounding their fathers' a-joining farms.
“What the hell took you so long?” Vivian chortled with reverse psychology.
“I figured you wouldn’t start looking without me, Chicken Shit. Well will ya look at that, the Grand Puba was right again. You can cook in the middle of this field. I’m surprised we never looked before.”
“He kneww we’d probably blow ourselves up” Vivian continues digging agitatedly with a trowel she brought along.
“Not ‘probably’ Vivian, we would have blown ourselves up.”
Carol snuffs her half smoked cigarette and bends down to help. Vivian finds the pipe right were Papa’s Living Will and its chicken scratch writing foretold. Soon she would sit over a small gas flame, boiling a veggie hotdog.
“Want one..?”
“yuk-phooey. No I’d rather die,” Carol smothers the flame from the two inch pipe, extending out of the clay loam soil, with the dirty boiling pot as Vivian stuffs the rest of the dog in her mouth.
“Huaa..but ba bot back hin ma ca….,” her mouth jammed with dry bun.
Carol calls Vivian every month to keep her posted. The latest spirit, a grey long hair cat, shattered like glass in front of her. She had moved back to her father’s farm in 2010 and she is pissey that it takes Vivian so long to come home.
“Are you flipping kidding me right now?” bursts Carol. Vivian is on her last nerve. Last week’s spirit adventure ‘freaked her freak.’
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