Modern American Memoirs by Annie Dillard Page B

mountains, out of the straining sight of Plains dwellers as far east as ourselves, there may lie the pearly bank called the Chinook Arch, but that would be no comfort to us even if we could see it—only a confirmation of the foehn wind.
    Searing wind, scorching sky, tormented and heat-warped light, and not a tree. The band of shade thrown by the shack narrows as the sun climbs, until at noon it is gone. It will be two hours before it is wide enough on the other side to shelter a boy’s body. There is no refuge except inside. The green blinds are drawn, the canvas flaps are rolled down over the screens of the sleeping porch; the light is dusky and comforting to the eyes. But the still air is hotter, if anything, than that outside. Outside, the wind dries sweat before it ever bubbles through the little wells of the pores; inside we are sticky and labor for breath. The wind bellies the canvas in the porch, leaks past. Driven from the still heat of the shack, we look out the door into the white glare of the yard and the hallucinatory writhing of the horizon, and are driven back in again.
    On such a day my mother would not try to cook anything on the Florence kerosene stove. She would have milk, butter, eggs, anything perishable, down in the semi-cool hole under the trapdoor in the floor, down among the spiders. Bacon, ham, dried beef, about the only meats we can use because they are the only ones that will keep more than a day, are buried deep in a box of oats to keep them cooler and moister. Hung in the air they would grow rancid, be blown by the flies, harden like rock. During the hot-wind days the gingersnaps that are our standard cookies are so dry and hard they fly into fragments when we take a bite; if they should grow soft we would take it as an almost certain sign of coming rain.
    At meal time the trapdoor is raised and up come crocks of tepid milk, often “on the turn,” and the dish of butter. We dine, these days, primarily on homemade bread and butter, sometimes with peanut butter, sometimes with brown sugar, sometimes with a slather of Karo syrup or molasses. But eating, ordinarily our purest pleasure, is no fun. There is a headachy crankiness around the table, the flies are infuriating. Before it has been on the table five minutes, the butter is ghee, yellow liquid that we scoop up with spoons to spread our bread. Put down into the hole again, it will harden into a flat, whitish, untasty-looking sheet sprinkled with a rime of salt like an alkali flat. When spread, it is coarse and crumbly, without buttery consistency and with a rancid taste. Sometimes, in spite of the twists of flypaper hanging in a dozen places from the ceiling, and the big treacherous sheets spread around on tables and boxes, all of them murmurous with trapped flies, we will find in the melted-and-congealed-again butter a black kinked leg or a transparent wing.
    And what of the insects caught in that heat-softened, incredibly sticky flypaper? I used to watch for minutes at a time as some fly, gummed and stuck with glue, his wings plastered to his body, his legs fused, dragged himself with super-fly effort toward the edge of a sheet, and made it, and rested there, slimed with the death he had dragged with him, and then tried with his stuck-together forefeet to wipe his head and clean himself. A fly could often drag himself a good way through the warmed glue, but even if he made it to the edge he didn’t have a chance. I used to put pencil circles around some struggler still hopefully mopping his head with his slimed feet, and come back later to see if he had got clean and got away. Henever had. Once I caught my mother watching me , and together, for a while, we stared at the sheet of gummed paper loud with the buzzing of flies whose feet were caught but whose wings were still free. We watched a few get their wings caught too, so they could only slide and crawl. My mother’s lips drew up as if she tasted something nasty.