Close Call
That big tumbleweed was gone yesterday. It was as if it had never been there. It had spent all last winter out between the Cottonwood tree and the propane tank.
At first it seemed harmless enough in spite of its size, which was over eight feet tall and almost as wide. At first it didn’t bother anybody. At least not until the winds came last March. Then, every time I’d go to check the propane level or to put water on the Cottonwood tree out back it would glare down at my puny six foot frame and shudder and shake with each breath of wind, stuggeling to pull loose from the greasewood branches that were somehow holding it back.
I had heard about people who where attacked by packs of smaller tumbleweeds during the windstorms. Some needed medical attention, but for others nothing could be done. The Old People used to say that if a tumbleweed gets ahold of you, it’s thorns would inject their seeds under the skin of your arms and into your stomach and when the seeds germinated, they would feed on your body, and that’s where the really big tumbleweeds come from.
I guess that the reason it left here was because nobody would get close enough to it and so it finally decided to move on. Maybe it tumbled north toward Tularosa and found somebody there who didn’t know.
~ Kenneth Nicholson
