By Wayne Allensworth
Rows of trees that have finally lost their leaves line a wide path that runs between fences around houses and a business park near my home. The long, wide belt of grass is a sort of unofficial nature sanctuary in an area where the suburbs have crept into the countryside. I often walk there and if I don’t avert my line of sight from the path, I can imagine I am far from the suburban development that has encircled and swallowed so many small towns in Texas.
The white winter sun sits low in the sky, a sky as glaringly white at its horizon as the sun itself. But the sun’s light is softer now, and the ground half-covered in long shadows. Its winter rays lack the stinging heat of summer.
In the spring, wildflowers cover the grassland. But in winter, the grass is brown and fallow, sleeping at its roots and waiting, waiting for its next burst of life. As are the trees. Their long, tangled limbs hang forlornly over the grass and the fence line, like long fingers either desperately reaching for the next wave of life or beckoning to it. And to me.
A barbed wire fence lines one length of the belt of grass. It’s an island of mesquite and small clumps of cacti, and the brown grass is a pasture for a group of longhorns that graze in it. Each time I walk past the wire, I look for them. On Christmas Day, I walked along the fence line and they were very near to me. A bull calf followed me along the fence, watching my every step. In the distance, another calf jumped playfully. I’ve seen a man walking in the pasture from time to time, walking close to the cattle and watching them. The pasture is behind an old house that I can only imagine belonged to his parents, perhaps, or his grandparents. The majestic longhorns are a remembrance of things past. He keeps them, nurtures them, and walks among them. He seems so reverent, and I feel that reverence and share the remembrance. Does the calf mistake me for him?
A big bull, his horns spreading to an impressive breadth, nudges along a cow who walks with him. He is black and white. She and several other cows are the typical orangish spotting on a white coat, and their horns are wide, too, in proportion to the bodies that carry them. The bull and cow walk slowly past me, and I stand and watch, and try to imagine what it was like so long ago, when cowboys rounded them up in the thousands and drove them along the Chisholm Trail, which once ran so near to us. Now we are bystanders watching the new world go by.
Ahead of me, I see something flitting through the tall brown grass. It’s a coyote, trotting across the pasture, watching me over its shoulder, turning its head from time to time to see where I am, as I continue my path along the fence line. I’ve heard that a coyote crossing in front of you is a sign, maybe of a change to come. It’s eerily silent here. No one is out and about on Christmas Day. And I watch the coyote squeeze under the fence and trot just ahead of me, always looking back to check my location. I’ve seen all sorts of wildlife in this grass belt, including a huge roadrunner that flitted through the field one day and disappeared into the mesquite. Bobcats sometimes appear in the nearby neighborhood and people warn one another to keep an eye on their small pets.
The coyote suddenly races away from me and disappears in the tree line to my left, like a memory that flashes through my mind, but is always there, waiting. In the winter light we wait on what will come, and on the coldest days, we imagine the wildflowers of spring, blossoming like a new hope. We wait and hope, knowing that the seasons turn, and that life goes on. I’ll walk this path again and imagine every step as a line in a hymn.
Happy New Year!
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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