Word: cedar
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Daniel W. Shenk Cedar Falls, Iowa
...square in Marshall, seat of Searcy County, Ark., men sit around in front of Buck Mays' store whittling down sticks of cedar. They do not whittle an object-a slingshot, say, or a whistle-so much as they just whittle away the stick. They make long, precise strokes, and the shavings curl before the blade like something delicate being wound. When the stick is reduced to an aromatic pile on the sidewalk, they go and get another...
...hair, and Jan Blackwell washed and cut Jill's. The men took the children out to buy kites. Across the street, old people were playing dominoes in the basement of the courthouse. An elderly man was walking round the square whacking headless parking meters with his cedar stick. He said he used to walk around whacking them when the meter tops were attached, but the city had the meters taken off because they cost too much to keep in good repair. "It used to make a bigger racket before they cut 'em down...
...last thing they do is sweep the wood shavings separate from the clumps of clipped hair. They take the cedar home to their farmhouse and use it to start a sweet-scented fire...
After Iowa, Mondale is slugging, Glenn is sagging, and Hart is hanging in First Des Moines and Cedar Rapids in Iowa, then Manchester and Concord in New Hampshire: plain-folks places nearly as thick with TV equipment and visiting reporters as Sarajevo had been the week before. But unlike the Olympics, which had enough surprises to keep things interesting, the quadrennial race for the Democratic presidential nomination was beginning to look like a predictable rout. "We got the gold and silver medals," declared Walter Mondale's polltaker, Peter Hart, after the Iowa caucuses. "Everybody else fought over the bronze...