The Sack Race I Ran Behind the Barn

My mother sewed Easter dresses out of sacks like it when she was a girl. This one she never cut. I had been saving it thirty years for something and never known what.

I had carried that sack through two moves and a wedding and never put the shears to it. My mother is in that cloth more than she is in any photograph I own.

For a second I thought, you cannot cut this. Then I thought about Bo folding his paper number smaller and smaller, and I got the shears.

I laid it out on the table and I cut it into ribbons. A dozen of them, each with a scrap of those blue flowers, a safety pin on the back of each.

“These are the prizes,” I told Bo the next morning. “First, second, third, and everybody who finishes gets one too. You’re going to hand them out.”

He ran his thumb over the flowers. “Was this Grandma’s?”

“Your great-grandma’s,” I said. “The one you never got to meet. She’d like this.”

He nodded like a boy accepting a serious job, which is exactly what it was.

Spreading The Word

I did not make flyers. In Cedar Bluff you do not need flyers, you need to tell three women and stand back.

I told Marge first. She lives at the county road corner and has run the Lutheran church kitchen since the Carter administration.

I told her at the gas pump Friday morning. By noon she had called nine people and appointed herself in charge of coffee.

I told the Hoff girl, who is nineteen and babysits half the township. I asked her to bring the little ones she watched on Saturday.

I did not say one word about Lorene. Not the courthouse lawn, not what had been said about my son.

I said only that we were having a race behind the barn Saturday at ten, free, bring the kids, bring a chair.

Word moves fast on a gravel road in October. The beans were in and nobody had much to do but wait on the corn to dry down.

I priced a gunny sack at the co-op Friday just to know. About four dollars now, which surprised me.

The man behind the counter asked what I needed burlap for in October. “A sack race,” I said.

He grinned and threw two extra in the back of the truck for free, so I would have eight, and told me his granddaughter would want in.

That was the first I understood this was going to be bigger than our road.

By Friday afternoon it had a life of its own. Marge called to say the Petersens were bringing a shade canopy, and did I want her to bake or to fry.