We sit on the grass and watch a high school band blow past in plumed hats and maroon and yellow buccaneer outfits, followed by a caravan of old, two-cylinder John Deere tractors that go farting down the road.  The parade is short but seems longer because it comes around twice, like summer reruns.  Most of the floats alternate between twin pillars of small-town life, commerce and religion, so staggered between Dairyland Beef Producers and Throndson LP Gas is the Eyota Methodist Church Study Group (“Growing in Faith”).  The Viola Gopher Gals’ float features a quilt to be raffled at tonight’s dance.  And four altar boys from Holy Redeemer Catholic Church share the bed of a pickup with a tilting, life-size plaster Jesus, arms outstretched as if to catch Himself.  When the Eyota Volunteer Fire Departments’ lime-green engine rolls past, sirens screaming, the bearded fire chief (another brother-in-law) leaps from the tanker and sprays bystanders with water from a pressurized canister.  It feels pretty good.  The Olmsted County dairy princess slides past in a red convertible with her court, runner-ups who lack the princess’s blond pizzazz but seem more reliable, more the sort you end up marrying.  The girls look young enough to enjoy riding on the backseat of a red convertible but old enough to understand that once you’ve been paraded down Main Street in your prom dress there’s nothing much left to do except leave, so their stiff-armed waves seem as much farewell as greeting.  A short gap in the parade and a silvery float hooves into view, bearing a white-haired couple, the king and queen of the Viola Gopher Count, on what appears to be a scaled-down version of the Parthenon.  Their placement at the end of the parade, so close on the heels of the youthful dairy princesses and court, seems deliberately ironic, a comment on the relentless march of time or a before-and-after picture of our lives, until I realized that the parade has simply come around again and this is not the end but the beginning.

John Hildebrand teaches in the Department of English at UW-Eau Claire. He is the author of three nonfiction books, the most recent of which is A Northern Front (2005), as well as a collection of essays that previously appeared in such magazines as Harper's, Audubon, Outside, Sports Illustrated, Manoa, and The Missouri Review. The excerpt above is from Mapping the Farm (2001), reprinted by permission of the author. You can learn more about John here.

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