I’ve taken to watching for tumbleweeds.  Here, in the long pause between lashing rain,  one careens down the center rut of the road, a tumbleweed with no wheels, big as an SUV, steering cable cut, the color of mildewed dust.  It came from further up—higher on the hill—places out of sight.  Wind tears them from the saturated slopes, pummels them to action one by one.  If I’d crossed the road without looking, stepped into its hell-bent-for-leather path in the brokelight of a January storm, I’d have been tumbled too.
   Fences.  Wind.  Tumbleweeds.  The pig-tail days of twelve, striped tees and jeans.  The dirt-clod field where the Dodd’s and Nelson’s, Tingle’s and Due’s hit long fly balls and grounders.  High ground above the river; Etiwanda Avenue; our backstop, a line of eucalyptus trees, trees that stopped nothing.  Thud and crack of ash bat to hardball, showing the boys I could hit, catch line drives they couldn’t.  And up in the rainbow-curls of eucalyptus bark, the youngest Dodd boy, slow-witted or bored, blew great foamy gobs of spit.  Cackles from his monkey face and hoots of derision when he hit.  Not easy to watch the pitch, impossible focus when concentration is split.
   Not a proper baseball field.  A five-acre lot.  A far fence stuck with blown tumbleweeds.  The Santa Ana River below.  Cows roaming the basin.  Black and white Holsteins.  Ginger Brahmas with eye-liner’d eyes, drapey neck wattles, shoulder humps.  A dangerous breed.  The bulls for no reason.  The cows if we got between them and their calves.  A pawed cloven hoof.   A snort not heard but read like the deaf read lips.  A riffle in the chest and a basin tree’s low fork I could climb. 
   That was then.  Then, when Santa Ana winds piled tumbleweeds into long walls.  When the walls became ladders, more tumblers rolled over them as if doughboys rising out of World War I trenches.  When domestic herds roamed the freedom of river and flood plain.   There was Wayne Tingle and his army of Dodd boys.  There was the clearing they’d commandeered and the guerilla war they would embark upon if the dirty, Red Commies or Cubans invaded.  There were red Manzanita limbs for M-16’s.  There were hand-stretched strings on willowy bows.  There were twiggery arrows.  Lethal as a boy’s imagination allows.

The dusty mint green—fuzzy burs of beginning, those blossomings of scratchy stems, leaves—is long spent.  Only onion shapes of airy abrasiveness, and they are present in memories or present in what will come.
   Vietnam, real guns: the delta of the Mekong and real boys, gone.  I can’t see the jungle, only the narrow trunks of Santa Ana river bottom trees.  Then the olive complexion of Wayne whose cheek barely knew a razor: missing in action some days before a black bag zipped shut.  Parts and tags.  Tags and parts.  Where was his look-out?  Who was on point?  Did he listen for snapped twigs or does anything crunch in a jungle?   I see myself launching dirt clods at him in a war between tumbleweed forts in a field where fly balls hit mitts and mines were only those dug with our short shovels bought at the Army-Navy surplus store.  Where the only no-man’s land was in front of a Brahma bull or a cow separated from her son.
   Forty-three years and the full, round weeds end their cycles at fencelines or borders of oleander and bougainvillea, trapped, until their bodies pile up.  Then, with the debris of what’s stopped before, the next is air borne.  Winds shift.  Weather settles.  And wars:  fractionally, seasonally, cancerously in remission.
   The long look loses focus—a conjured Dodd boy in a tree is not something you can see, his spit has missed you, your eyes have not darted to that long string of drool daring you to glance back for the pitch, daring you to watch Wayne’s long-armed windup and release of a fast ball you know will cross in the strike zone—between your scabbed knees and the newspaper-green rubber bands your mother has bound off your braids with. 
Home plate is a pillowcase filled with some dirt and folded to shape with a point toward the mound.  The mound has been leveled.  The rutted road is empty.

Random tumbleweeds rolling toward you.  What a better way could there be to tie together the memories of a western life?  The bits that stick in one's brain building and combining as the years pass, so eloquently spoken. 

(I sort of - just sort of - don't like the last line!)

This should be picked and I'll do so shortly.

I took off the first part of the last line.  Any better?

Lynn, With random becoming the focus, I think LV is right about the end. It might need to something to veer it, to insinuate that it(memories) can be propelled down an even different slope. Some thoughts:

I think you need to trim some of the I's. Instead of places "I haven't walked"; places out of sight. Nix "I know" : Winds tear them... End P1 at "...tumbled too."

 Works and holds the reader.
This gets muddy cause we get the sense that you want to tell us how the memories continue to ramble along the random paths. It's like the metaphor is getting explained. I don't have a good suggestion.

   This part works and one can sense the tumbleweed's action in the memory. Quite something.

  It could be the problem is the second person referencing weakens the reader's engagement with the N?

Anyway some thoughts on this for what their worth.

larry

They're worth a lot!  Will cut a check and get it off in the mail ASAP!

I've made edits in all the areas mentioned.  I've made another stab at the closing lines.  And removed the second person (although I did like addressing the audience; still, if this reads in a stronger way for this particular piece, then good.  if not, i have saved the original.  how fickle a writer am I?)

thanks, hugely, to both of you.  Can't tell you how much I appreciate your time.

ld

I think the edits work. Lynn, there is an online zine that specializes in nonfiction essays of work that cannot exceed 755 words. It's called Brevity. Might want to check it out.

larry