Subject: RE: Winfield Kansas
From:
BSeed
Date: 26 Sep 98 - 04:36 AM
Art, your song reminds me of the story of the Rary that ravaged the countryside in England a few decades ago. It was just a tiny ball of fur, a mere handful, when it was first found among the dust devils under a farmer's bed. The farmer at first thought it WAS a dust devil until it started moving on its own, rolling along the floor.
The farmer's wife thought it was cute and picked it up and put it in a box and gave it some cheese, which it ignored, and some sausage, from which it rolled to the other side of the box. But when she put in a piece of lettuce, it rolled up to it and right across, leaving a trail of bare cardboard behind. In a few seconds, it had rolled around and around and the lettuce was all gone.
The farmer's wife thought it was very cute, and because she had never seen one before, nor even heard of one before, thought it must be very rare, and so called it her little Rary, so excited that she didn't notice that it had increased noticeably in size. She had much to do so she tossed a few more leaves of lettuce into the box and went back to her cooking.
After a while she heard a commotion behind her and looked around just in time to see the box turned on its side and the Rary rolling out the door. This time she noticed that it was about four times as large as when her husband found it, and she watched as it rolled across the garden, growing larger and larger as it left a widening line of bare earth in her radish patch and headed on through her husband's field of beans.
By the time it reached their neighbor's lettuce, it seemed to be several feet in diameter and somehow, while rolling straight ahead was clearing a path twice as wide through the greens. It disappeared over a grassy knoll (not the same one) but soon reappeared, undiminished by perspective, cutting a swath through a cherry orchard.
Finally, she came to her senses and called her husband who watched in horror as it cleared a path southward. He called his neighbors, some of whom had already seen it, and rallied them into a fighting force...
...to put an end to an already too long narrative, the farmers were finally able by sacrificing several truckloads of radicchio and arugula and vegetable marrows to lure it eastward toward the White Cliffs of Dover. There the Rary, now ten meters in diameter, stopped, just short of the edge of the cliff, and the band of farmers ran up to it with poles and prods and pitching forks. "At it, lads," the first farmer shouted as his wife watched from a distance, wiping a tear from her eye. "We'll tip 'im off the cliff and be well rid of 'im."
As the monstrous fur-ball reached the very edge of the cliff, a wee head thrust itself out above the chasm, looked down, and looked back at the farmers. "I say," a plaintive voice wailed, "it's a long way to tip a Rary!" --seed
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