Windbreak House

What's Here?

Just for fun here are some photos and some excerpts from Linda's books about prickly things on the prairie.


Buffalo Berries

Barb-wire fences

Prickly Pear Cactus

TV Antenna

Yucca


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Their hidden weapons make buffalo berries the elite among wild fruit.The thorns can be up to six inches long, all scientifically placed so that you cannot pick a single berry without puncturing naked hands. Even leather gloves don't save you from injury.

Buffalo berries are symbolic, to me, of the answer to the question all plains people are eventually asked. . . "Why do you stay here?"

These tart little berries on hidden, thorny bushes are what the modern people of the plains have become. We're not easy to find, and we tend to be a little prickly if we've been here long. Hardship and freedom breed stoicism, and don't leave us with much patience for such questions. But when you get to know us, when you understand a little of the plains, we're rare and tasty.

-- from Land Circle: Writings Collected from the Land
pages 23-25, published 1991, Fulcrum Publishing


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Every night I watch TV, watch the men with their ties and neat sport coats, the women with perfectly groomed hair, long polished fingernails and success dresses, reciting the list of who bombed who that day, what natural disaster killed thousands, the latest difference of opinion taken into a courtroom, and I wonder if there’s any hope for humanity at all.

Then each morning I look at my bitten fingernails as I shove a teat into a calf’s mouth and watch his little tail switching as the cow burps with contentment and think, “Well, something will survive. It may not be us, but something will survive.”

-- from Windbreak
page 135, published 1987, Barn Owl Books


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