Night must be falling.
How far is this Emerald City?
If I have to spend the night outside in this cold, I might scream. I don’t mind getting dirty on the farm, or doing hours of hard labor, but when it comes to a nighttime routine with a bed and a pillow and a blanket at the very least, I am immutable.
Even when I was young and didn’t entirely understand what I had lost, it was Henry and Em creating a safe place for me to rest my head at night that made me feel… rooted, maybe, or something close to it.
As I got older and started making friends at school, I found I enjoyed their company and liked getting out of the house, but I turned down every invitation to stay the night elsewhere. I couldn’t imagine sleeping anywhere other than my bed.
As Toto and I trudge on, the flower fields turn into cornfields and at least the familiarity of that gives me some semblance of comfort. To drive away the quiet (and hopefully any beasts that might roam in the shadows), I whistle one of Henry’s favorite tunes while we walk.
It’s a sound so ingrained in memory, it’s hard for me not to imagine Henry whistling it from the time of my birth. Aunt Em said it’s the music Henry was playing the day they met. It reminds me of the folk music they often feature at the harvestfestival at the end of the harvesting season, one of my favorite times of the year.
When I was a girl, I could turn sullen in a flash. If the sun disappeared behind the clouds. If I misplaced my favorite sweater. If I dropped a biscuit in the dirt.
I wasn’t a difficult child, but I was a melancholy one. There was an ever-present feeling of longing that I could never quite quell.
So to cheer me up, Henry would play. He loves the banjo, but he can play just about any string instrument, so some nights it was the guitar, others the ukulele. His singing voice is rich and husky, his music upbeat and joyful.
It makes me immediately miss Henry and Em.
Toto and I keep walking.
The cornfields persist and eventually my mind wanders, lulled into distraction by the unchanging landscape and the repetitive sound of my own tune.
I think of Edward.
I think of being his wife, a mother, a homemaker.
I was planning on telling him yes. Should I say yes?
There is a sinking feeling in my chest.
My stomach hurts so I take a drink of water from the thermos I found in the house.
I keep whistling, trying to turn my mood.
At the horizon, where the dark sky meets the dark line of trees, there is a flash of moonlight until it too is hidden behind the never-ending dark cloud overhead.
I may have to sleep in the cornfields after all.
I’ve just about resigned myself to this idea when I pass a scarecrow staked in a crop row.
Thankfully, the East End is determined to keep the lights on regardless of population. I haven’t spotted a house in hours,but with precise predictability, every twenty feet, a lamppost glows in the dark.
The light casts an eerie glow on the scarecrow, making him look more man than stuffed effigy.
I slow my pace.
The scarecrow’s head is hung forward as if his body isn’t tied tightly enough to the pole.
Henry always tasked me with making scarecrows for the crop field. He said I was better at it than he was. He would give me several burlap sacks and one of his old flannels. To keep things interesting, I’d give the scarecrow a different face every year and I’d unveil the design in a sunset ceremony where Henry and Em were the only attendees.
Another pang of sadness hits me and I turn away as stinging wells in my eyes.
I’m going to make it home.
I’m going to find this Wizard and he’ll tell me how to get there—
