"Motif B32 - A Saturday in August" by Jamie Cheshire
Something had happened and the farm knew it.
Rooster Cogburn was a burly, jewel-toned arrogance of teals, reds, deeper reds, and blues shot through with lances of yellow and purple.
Fascinated with every big and little thing, Jamie Cheshire has long been an avid student of design and structure. Having worked together with giants, he has had the extreme good fortune to practice his craft for most of the last four decades and has seen his work appear nationally and in several countries on three continents. He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with his beloved feral, hippie-chick wife, their three dogs and two cats. Deeply committed to the ordinary, he is constantly searching for a way to describe it.
Author’s Talk
Jamie Cheshire
I suppose I could invent a story. If I didn't have one I could make one up. I could spin it out and then work on it to try to make it appealing.
But why?
Why would I do that when all I really need to do is watch what happens around me and then write it out?
I’ve been thinking about Merber ever since the day this all went down. It’s taken me a while to begin to see the story. Before I understood its end it wasn’t really anything more than a description of a couple of chickens and how their goofy lives played out in the presence of a dog.
It’s true. It happened this way, but I think it's impossible to write the truth because you either have to simplify or get lost in the details. You have to chop a small something out of a large something. Then what you have is different because it was made the truth by being part of what it was cut from. It’s observable that way but not tellable that way. You can never include it all.
I said nothing, for example, about the condition of the swing set. I did not mention there was also another rooster on the farm. Didn’t say anything about how the bellies of blacksnakes sound crunchy after they’ve visited the henhouse. I didn’t mention the slope of the pasture or how the barn was cut so splendidly into it. I also left out the long driveway graveled entirely with river stone, the smell of the equipment shed and the deep, remembering shade in the lane that made coming to it such a simple pleasure. Yet that was all there. I left out almost everything. I just told you farm. Whatever farm you saw, you brought to the story. You did that work for me. Thank you. We are co-creators.
Incubation times vary for stories. Had I started this one too early I would’ve had it wrong and it wouldn’t be interesting. It took several years for me to recognize this was a transition rather than an event - that it neither began at its beginning nor was its ending its end. It’s an account of what transpired in the turbulent moments between one understanding and another.
The specific beginning may have been an egg. The endpoint showed itself when I began with, “Merber was alive."
Now, I kinda want to go back to the river bottom and watch the sky for a large hawk.—Jamie Cheshire
