Dodo Eggs

I’m perched over a wide circular watering trough watching bugs dance over the surface like figure skaters.  The corners of four pastures converge here and the tops of the fences span the water’s dark surface.  It isn’t much of a seat.

The water isn’t dirty but it is cold enough to make you regret falling.  A thick moss grows along the bottom and sides of the well fed trough stealing all the light.  It’s impossible to see anything more than a couple of inches below the surface.

I grit my teeth and reach in the frigid pool.  My hand immediately comes into contact with the moss’s slimy surface.  I grasp it and tear the moss free from its anchor.  The dripping green wad is slung over the fence’s top flicking water everywhere.  I reach in again and again.

With a grunt, I keep adjusting my seat in the vain hope of finding a comfortable way of sitting on and inch and a half of weathered board.  I’ll have all I want soon and the water bugs, which were frightened by my work, can get back to their almost pointless skittering.

When I accumulate enough of the long, stringy slime, I hope back onto the hard prairie soil and begin wringing the water out.  The hot sun helps dry my raw material.  Before long, I am twisting the moss and tying the ends together.  I create a length of what I termed, “grassy twine.”  It isn’t real strong and the smell is bad.  Then again, what else to I have to do?

“Matt!  Matt!  C’mon!  Dog-gone it, it’s time to eat!”

Grandpa is walking my direction.  He’s a tall man sun browned with overalls frayed at every end.  His amble is gawky to watch.  His arms swing low and his knees flare out a bit as he takes each step. 

“I wish you boys would quit playing around that stupid tank!  You could fall in and that’d be the end of ya!”

Leaving my grass twine hanging over the fence, I begin running toward the house.  I don’t get far before a strange stone catches my eye.  It looks a little like an arrowhead.  After picking it up I race over to my grandpa.

“Na,” He looks at the quartz rock then tosses it aside.  “That isn’t an arrowhead.  I’ve been looking one on my land my entire life and I thought I’d never find one until one day I finally did.”

I asked if I could see it.

“Na, I’m not real sure where it is.  I think grandma probably put it someplace.  Anyway, I know I’ve got one.”

The idea stuck with me.  Looking for something extraordinary among the countless ordinary.  Scattered over miles of the Great Plains and hidden with the innumerable stones there still had to be arrowheads to be found!

I won’t spend my life working the land and thus having a chance to look for an arrow head but I did find a different pursuit.  Among the billions of coins that cross people’s hands there must still be silver coinage from before 1964.  There still had to be old bills stashed for years in back vaults!    

What did the moss have to do with anything?  One day after pulling cash from the bank, I noticed that one of the bills resembled that deep, strong green of the moss and wasn’t the olive color ink that marks newer bills.  I examined the ten and found that it was printed in 1950.

Years later, I’m still looking.  Believe me, it does make each and every handful of change a good bit more exciting.  At the grocery store or the gas station, whenever coins pass my palm they get a quick examination.  I’ve found countless wheat pennies, a silver quarter, and a mercury dime.  Finding the extraordinary from the mass of normal coins is always a bit exhilarating.  I’ll not miss my next one.

• Lost Coin
• The Mushroom Fable (Part 2)
• The Mushroom Fable (Part 1)
• Wishing Well Instructions
• Cloud Weavers (Part 1)