Apologies and freewrite for 9/28/06

I have been driven lately. Not by any fun writing project, but by work. I have been trying.

And failing.

Freewrite
We couldn’t explain their presence. It was foreign to us. We leaned on the plows and watched as the oxen swatted at flies with their tails.

The line of trucks crept along the winding path of the dirt road. People crowded the roadside to watch them pass and congregate in a newly cleared lot at the edge of our farm.

Long wide poles piled on the backs of the trucks, the chains kept them in place. The security guards all dressed the same and walked the same way. A slow methodical strut, the laying of one foot in front of the other at precise distances. They watched the crowd, they watched the hillsides. They even watched us, here in the field, leaning on the wooden plows that had served our family for generations.

A few months passed, and as they did, a new farm was erected, made up of giants straining into the sky, seeming to pierce into the heavens. The rains started early, perhaps marking the anger of the gods at this unnatural farm of steel, copper, and aluminum.

When it was done, 300 of them stretched into the sky and interrupted the horizon. Our crops were meager next to them. The guards explained they were meant to catch the wind with their gigantic arms stretching the length of 20 men.

Madness, we thought. Who would want to harness the wind? Why? For power, the guards told us. Energy, electricity. The churning arms generated electricity, in the same way the crops soak up the sun and water to generate life sustaining food.

They rose up at the edge of the land, the behemoths serenaded the sky with their spinning arms.