Neola
Neola. A Greek word meaning a young’un, a girl,
the name of a town in Iowa, Pottawattami County,
memorializing a Native tribe that was “removed,”
shoved around the Midwest as settlers, moving in,
scalped the rich prairie, exposing the soil to winds
that, in 1933, lifted up and blew away one third of
a billion tons of soil from the Plains. The immense
cloud of dirt turned day to night across the country,
all the way to New York City and Washington, D.C.,
before flopping down far out to sea.
Back in the 1930s,
Neola’s population was nine hundred and forty-four.
The doctor made his calls by horse and buggy. Once
a week, on Saturday, weather permitting, the grown
sisters who lived across the street took their baths in
a washtub on the porch. There was no traffic, nobody
stopped to stare. One of their uncles hanged himself
in a barn out back. The Great Depression had begun.
One night the moon rose
at the end of the road. I was walking with a girl my age,
five. We were holding hands. It was a full moon and it
was right there, ahead, at the top of the road -- red as
the sun. And it kept getting bigger, and I wondered if
it meant the end of the world and said so to my friend,
who, with a nod, agreed. We stared, then started back
until we saw my father, reading indoors by lamplight,
and we went in. I asked him if the red moon we’d seen
meant the end of the world. And, eighty-odd years ago,
he said no.
