Myrtle Deane - Part 2
Back home in Kennebec THREE-MINUTE conclusion
This is Part 2 of Myrtle Deane. If you like, you can review PART 1
Myrtle Deane was lying in the bottom of a small skiff. She’d been drifting drowsily in a corner of Webber Pond all morning long, lost in reflection, full of memories of her childhood. Her eyes followed a wisp of clouds and captured the green of the peripheral pinewood. She breathed in air that carried the familiar scent of moss, water-weed and juniper. She reveled in the well-known song of the hermit thrush and the whistling of starlings echoing from the forest. She wasn’t thinking beyond this one day, there was only here, only now. She was back home in Kennebec!
Distant, in space and time, were the dry yellow fields of the mid-west, the stifling heat and flocks of shrieking crows. Distant the dreaded demands of her husband’s farm. And his tedious affection.
In time, he stood on her front porch with his hat in his hand. He rubbed the dust from his boots on the back of his pant legs. “May I see Myrtle, please,” he said. “I am her husband.”
He’d come by train all the way from Kansas to take her back home with him. He stood over her as she sat in the backyard swing. “Myrtle, please come back with me. I need you. You are my wife. I can’t live without you. Please. Come home.”
But today, Myrtle sits on a folding stool on the wooden dock. As the sun rises, she’s painting a landscape in shades of pearl and of gray. She spies a cloud shaped like a horse galloping across the sky. And from the trees again, she hears the lament of the thrush and the whistle of starlings. Myrtle Deane has come home to stay.
Excellent. Sad and optimistic in equal measure. Burn down one life to make a new one. I picture this as a period piece where it would require bravery and/or desperation to leave.
Very much drawn to these lines. They are the keystone.
"Distant, in space and time, were the dry yellow fields of the mid-west, the stifling heat and flocks of shrieking crows. Distant the dreaded demands of her husband’s farm. And his tedious affection."
She did well to get away. Great conclusion, Sharron. So much imagery in so few words.