Prairie Spirit

Ronald Douglas Drobeck

 

One sunny day, while driving for the Big Stone Cheese Factory, I’d made my right turn off of Hwy 212 onto a gravel road somewhere below the Wilmot Whipple farm.

I picked up milk here and there until I had to downshift my way up a long gravel incline that eventually allowed me to overlook the great Whetstone Valley on my right.

As I began to gain speed again at the top of the hill, a girl with long black hair trailing behind her was galloping her ‘paint’, bareback, on the prairie grass covered hilltop to the right of me.

She appeared as if I was witnessing a flashback, a moving picture of this black haired girl riding over that rolling hill with the valley in the background. There was the hill green and the sky blue, the rocks and the prairie grass, a little haze off toward the eastern horizon, that black hair waving in time with the gallop, and the white and brown horse, all flashing past my little truck window frame.

In an instant, this vision of the prairie hill’s past burned into my mind, somewhere southeast of Sisseton, South Dakota.

If asked, I would say this was one of my favorite snapshot memories as I was taken purposely back in time for an instant.

Whimsy from a prairie spirit?

Yes, romantically my mind tells me it was. I won’t give that up.

At this writing, you are the first to know. I’ve kept it to myself until now.

Why do I feel that a prairie spirit ‘touched’ me?

There is more to the story!

This spirit and I may have made contact a few years before…… in another story, on another special day.