The Side of the Road - Susan

This started as a 10-minute exercise. I kept expanding it, trying to give a better sense of setting -- both time and place. We meet Fila again, now as a young woman, married with four sons.

Fila stood in the warmth of an early November afternoon beside the dusty, hard-packed dirt road running from Dallas all the way to Fort Worth. In her hands she held a surveyor’s map and property specifications for the 26 acres spread out in front of her. Shading her eyes with her hand, she gazed out at the property George was determined to buy. Fila had learned over the years that George’s ideas almost never panned out, and Fila was opposed to leaving McKinney and her mother’s family for the uncertainty of Dallas. However, George was convinced the construction in a city booming with oil and gas money would mean more work for him and more money to educate their four boys.

Although she remained unconvinced, Fila knew that George was one to dig in his heels when challenged, and her arguments only increased his determination to move the family yet again. To keep the peace and break his stony silence, she agreed to drive a borrowed car the 30 miles from Plano to look over the property, knowing full well her opinion would carry little weight.

Even as doubt crowded out optimism for this latest scheme, Fila knew that George needed to leave the blacksmith business where he was underpaid and overworked. With the automobile replacing horse and wagon, blacksmithing was becoming obsolete, and George’s future in Plano was limited. However, Fila carried a nagging knot in her stomach, born of fear for adding more debt to what they still owed her stepfather. They never seemed to be able to get ahead, always taking two steps back for every step forward. “When will it end?” she wondered.

Fila pushed aside doubt as she took in what she could see of the 26 acres. Some of the land had been worked recently, the detritus of a past cotton crop still littered the ground. A small grove of pecan trees bordered a field to the east where a donkey stood motionless by a split rail fence, his companion bird dog asleep beside him. Fila smiled at the sight and wondered if the dog and donkey came with the property.

Consulting the map, she took in the boundaries of the fields and calculated that the spread could support a few head of livestock and a sizable vegetable garden. She imagined a summer trade where the boys could sell fresh vegetables and shelled pecans to the travelers who were sure to come when the proposed viaduct across the Trinity River was built.

Fila was nothing if not practical. With a keen sense of value and potential, she turned her eyes to the barn and the farmhouse, both large, well built, and, from where she stood, in good shape. The house faced north, a red brick, two-story, with a covered porch entrance and windows across the front. A mature live oak tree stood not far from a stone wall that separated the yard from the field to the west of the house.

It was a long way from Plano and the life she and her family had built there, surrounded by her uncle's wealth and her stepfather’s family. But fate, not fortune, had intervened yet again. Resigned, she sighed and said to the gods who may or may not have been listening, “This will do. This will have to do.”