Brown Grass
By Jeff Baker
A lot of things make me nostalgic this time of year, especially since I outlived my immediate family. I have some distant cousins I rarely see and some found family that I talked about in last December’s column. https://www.queerscifi.com/jeff-baker-boogieman-in-lavender-found-family/ All of them have been hugely supportive.
But that’s not what I want to talk about.
I live in Kansas. Driving from one town to the other involves covering a lot of ground, usually on the highway. Lots of farmland and a lot of grass by the roadside. In spring and summer that grass ought to be greenish but in times of drought it’s been brown like it usually is during fall and winter. And that brings back memories.
Junior High and High School in the ‘70s largely sucked. I didn’t even know (or act like) I was Bisexual, but I’d had a lot of facial reconstructive surgery and a major speech impediment. But my times at home and with family and a few friends were wonderful.
On vacations we would drive up to Kansas City where my Dad’s family lived. Somehow the brown grass always says “Thanksgiving” to me, even during the summer.
I am not being naive; I am fully aware of the chaos the voters unleashed last month. But even in this dark season we can find reasons to be thankful.
We have family, chosen or not. We have each other. We have our history and our pride and nobody is stuffing us back in a closet.
We have the internet, and even with the vast potential for misinformation it can be used to correct the record and spread facts.
We have the knowledge that we are living in an unsettling time where dictators may not have as firm a foothold as they imagined.
And, we’re alive.
Jeff Baker’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared online and in print in various markets. His World Of Three Moons story “The Ghannidor-Ra” was recently published in “Schlock Webzine.” https://www.schlock.co.uk/ He blogs about reading and writing sci-fi, fantasy and horror around the thirteenth of each month in this same space. He wishes all his readers the best for the holidays. Jeff regularly posts fiction on his blog https://authorjeffbaker.com/ and wastes time on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=679510827 and Mastodon (as “Mike Mayak.”) https://mastodon.otherworldsink.com/@MikeMayak
