Who I am. My name is Velma Stroud. I was born in a sod-roofed claim shack in western Kansas in March of 1911, the year before the Titanic went down, and I have lived in this same corner of the state for all of it except two weeks in Colorado in 1958 that I did not care for. I was married to Clarence for fifty-two years and we farmed wheat for most of them. He has been gone since 1982. Now I live in an assisted-living apartment in Garden City with a kitchenette I don't cook in and a window that looks at the parking lot. My great-granddaughter Brittany comes on Sundays and sometimes after school, and she sits at the computer they put in our library room and types down what I say. I've got nothing left to hide, so here we are.

Last night was the harvest moon. Brittany's mother had read in the paper that it would be full, so they came over after supper and Brittany wheeled me out the side door past the nurses' station. Loretta at the desk said, "Now don't you two run off," and I told her I hadn't run anywhere since Eisenhower.

Here is the funny thing about these eyes. I can't read a newspaper and I can't see Brittany's face in the middle, only the edges of her. But I can see that moon just fine. It came up over the grain elevator big and orange as a pumpkin, and then it got higher and went white. The little things are going first. The big things stay.

Clarence used to say the harvest moon was so a farmer could keep cutting after dark. Then he'd keep cutting after dark, and I'd take him coffee and a sandwich out to the field in the pickup, and we'd sit on the tailgate a minute. That was all the romance we had time for and it was plenty.

Brittany asked me, sitting out there, if I was scared of dying. She asked it very quiet, like it might break something. I told her the truth. No. I was scared in 1935, when I had a baby and the sky came down black. I was scared when Clarence was in the hospital in Wichita. But I am eighty-eight years old and I have been to more funerals than weddings for twenty years now, and I have noticed that nobody at the front of the church looks worried. I expect when it comes it will be like being carried in from the car asleep when you were little. You wake up in your own bed and don't know how you got there.

[This is Brittany. I had to stop typing for a minute. Grandma Velma says to put in that she is not planning on going anywhere before Thanksgiving because she wants to see if my cousin Tyler really brings that girl.]

[Brittany here. I came after school. It is the first day of fall. Grandma Velma is tired today and her eyes are bad, and she says to tell everybody she is fine and to quit asking her. She also says to thank the lady in Ohio who e-mailed about her own grandmother. I read it to her twice.]

We buried Opal on Friday. She was ninety. We were in the same schoolhouse, the one-room kind, from 1917 on, and she sat behind me and dipped my braid in her inkwell the very first week. I didn't speak to her until Christmas. Then we spoke for eighty-two years.

The home sent me in the van with the lift on it. The Methodist church was about half full, which for ninety is a good crowd, because most of the people who would have come are already out in the cemetery waiting on her. They sang "In the Garden," which was her favorite and is also everybody's favorite, so you can't tell anything about a person by it. The young preacher called her "a woman of faith," which she was, but he didn't know she cheated at pitch or that she drove a grain truck in the war when the men were gone, or that she laughed so hard one time at a church supper that she had to go sit in her car.

Afterward in the basement there were ham sandwiches on the little buns and three kinds of potato salad and one of them was mine, the recipe I mean. Opal's daughter made it. That did something to me I can't tell you. Tonight Brittany's mother brought her Patsy Cline tape over because Opal liked Patsy, and we played "Sweet Dreams" twice.

I am the last one now from that schoolhouse. There were fourteen of us. Brittany wanted to know if that was lonesome. It is. But it is also a little like being the last one up at a party, when you can finally take your shoes off.

[Grandma Velma is laughing. I don't think I get it.]

Went to the eye doctor Wednesday. He is a nice young man about the age of my grandson. It is macular degeneration, the dry kind, which I already knew because my sister Iva had it. He says there's no shot or operation for mine. He says eat my greens. I have been eating greens for eighty-eight years, I said, and look where it got me. He laughed, which I appreciated.

What it is, is there's a gray thumbprint in the middle of everything. I look at the clock and the hands aren't there. I look at a face and there's no nose. If I look a little off to the side I can see more, so I go around looking at everybody sideways like a chicken.

The state library sends me books on cassette tapes in a green box with a machine to play them, and it goes back and forth in the mail free, which is the best thing the government has done since rural electric. I'm listening to Angela's Ashes. That poor family. We thought we had it hard.

Brittany has been reading me her new book about the boy wizard, the third one, which came out this week. I told her I don't hold with witchcraft and she said it's not like that, Grandma, it's about a school, and then she read me two chapters and I made her read me a third.

Reading (with my ears): Angela's Ashes. Reading (with Brittany's): Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Brittany has a paper to write for her history class about the Dirty Thirties, so today I am the history.

People think it was one big storm. It was years of them. It quit raining in about '31 or '32 and didn't really start again for going on eight years. The wind blew the plowed ground right up into the sky. We called the bad ones black blizzards, because that's what they were, only instead of snow it was our own dirt, and some of it was Oklahoma's and some of it was Colorado's.

The worst was Palm Sunday of 1935, the fourteenth of April. It was a pretty day. I remember that most. Warm and still and clear, and people were out visiting after church for the first time in weeks because it had been so dusty all March. Then in the middle of the afternoon the birds started going over, lots of them, all headed south, and the air went cold, and Clarence looked north and said, "Velma, get the baby." It came at us like a wall, black at the bottom and brown on top, rolling. When it hit, it was dark. Not dark like night. Darker. You could not see your own hand.

Our daughter Joyce was two. I had wet dishtowels over her crib and wet sheets hung over the doors and windows, and it came in anyway, it came through the keyholes. We turned the plates upside down on the table until we ate. We put Vaseline in our noses. When you touched the pump handle it would spark from all the static. Clarence came in from the barn by holding onto the fence.

Joyce got a cough that spring that I lay awake listening to. There was a lot of what they called dust pneumonia, and there were babies and old folks around us who didn't make it. Ours did. Joyce is sixty-six now and lives in Hutchinson and she still sleeps with the window shut.

People left. Half the section-line road emptied out. We stayed. I don't know to this day if that was brave or just stubborn. Clarence always said "next year," and one year he was right.

[Grandma Velma told me all this without stopping once. I am going to get an A.]

Brittany asked me today how I met Grandpa Clarence, whom she never got to meet, because he died two years before she was born. I've been thinking about him all afternoon.

I met him at a box supper at the schoolhouse in 1929. The girls fixed a supper and put it in a decorated box and the boys bid on them, and you weren't supposed to know whose was whose. Clarence knew. My sister Iva told him it was the one with the blue crepe paper. He paid a dollar and ten cents for fried chicken and a piece of burnt sugar cake, which was a lot in 1929, and he didn't say six words all night. I married him the next June anyhow.

He was not a talker. He showed you. He'd fix the latch on the screen door before you knew it was broken. When Joyce was born he walked the floor with her so I could sleep, and then went and cut wheat all day. He had big hands with the knuckles all cracked from work, and he'd put one on the back of my neck when we were sitting in church. Fifty-two years.

He died in his chair after supper in October of 1982 with the ball game on. The doctor said his heart just quit. I said it did not quit, it wore out, there's a difference.

I still talk to him. Out loud, some nights. Harold across the hall says he can hear me. Well, I can hear Harold's television, so we're even.

[She's laughing again.]

Everybody in this building has lost their minds over that Regis Philbin program where they ask questions for a million dollars. They put it on the big television in the dayroom most every night this week and you couldn't get a chair.

I knew more of the answers than the people on the stage, I want that written down. One young man in a nice suit missed a question any child in 1920 could have answered, and Harold hollered at the screen so loud Loretta came running.

Brittany says if I went on I'd need a lifeline, and I said honey, at my age you're it.

It was a hundred and one today. The wheat's long in. It doesn't matter to me anymore but I still look at the sky and figure.

This is the first one. Brittany set it all up while I sat here and asked questions. She picked the flowers and the little checks for the background. I said it looks like a tablecloth and she said, "That's the point, Grandma."

I don't know what anybody wants with the thoughts of an old woman in Kansas, but Brittany says grown people all over the country keep their diaries on here where anybody can read them. I told her I'd do it on two conditions. One, she types exactly what I say, even if I'm cranky. Two, she doesn't fix my grammar. She fixed it already twice, I can tell by the way she's smiling.

[I only fixed the spelling. - B.]