October 1879Mark Talbot
Court Reporter
Kansas City, Missouri
It always pleases city-folk to imagine that a childhood spent on a farm is pristine and ideal. But, in real life, I never found it so. The work was hard and there always seemed to be more of it. As for living close to nature, well, nature seemed scatterbrained to me, even treacherous, and I couldn’t wait to be freed from the oppression of it.
I was six years old, in seventy-four, when the ‘hoppers first came—millions upon millions of them, blacking the sky and covering the ground. They ate everything in their path, then did it again the next year, and the year after that.
In seventy-nine, when I was eleven, the rain fell and fell and fell. Unceasing, it was, and the mud was everywhere even into summer.
At school, my friends
