The hot summer heat beat down on the farm as I watched my husband talk with our neighbor about the land, about the produce this year, about the rain and the sun and the wind. His glasses slowly slid down the bridge of his nose and he pushed them back up before wiping the sweat off his balding head.
He'd always had higher dreams than working on a farm all his life. In his younger days, Jebidiah had hopes of sailing the high seas, exploring uncharted lands, discovering creatures that were never seen by the human eye.
But at the tender age of eighteen, we married, and when his father passed away it was his duty as a son and heir to carry on the family business. I told my husband, "Go, find these lands, explore the world! I will follow you to the ends of the Earth if that is your dream."
But loyalty always won out with him. Too focused on the desires of his deceased parents, he remained stuck on the farm he'd grown up on, never crossing even the state line for the past seventy years. I wondered, as I looked into his dark brown eyes full of thought and diplomacy, did he ever wish he'd pursued his dreams? Did he ever want to escape this farm, this prison that had held him captive for so long away from the adventure that had been calling him since childhood?
He stood there, holding his pitchfork, his knuckles whitening around it's handle, and I knew the answer. The air in this place is an oven, the dirt beneath our feet, a baking wasteland. And despite the life that bloomed all around us in the corn, the trees, the stream that beat wildly through it's course over yonder, this was not our dream.
