Grass Before Storm

Gouache 16 X 20 1993

The Melanie Gerhardt Collection

Wind. Wind dominates. Floods are rare. Clouds are threatening. One summer, at 16, Dad had purchased an old square farmhouse, to use as a garage, and repair area in town. He found the walls had been insulated with sod blocks…a link with the past. It was our job to extricate them, one by one. In the blazing heat of early summer…at noon break, I'd take my lunch, remove my shirt, lay in the hide-away tall grass. Watch a bank of clouds come from the south…feel the wind whip the grass across my brow…think of sod houses.