Dust Bowl Days

After whales, my first thought for this challenge was “migrant workers”. That thought led me to John Steinbeck’s classic The Grapes of Wrath. Every time I have moved, I've remembered the Joad family migration: truck packed with all their worldly possessions, traveling to find work farming the land.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

― John Steinbeck

Growing up in the south, I relate to the book's description of the sun parched earth and baking sand of the “Dust Bowl Days.” Though I can’t describe it, I can recognize the smell of dry Florida sand blazing in the summer heat beneath the palmettos. My quilt will definitely have yellow and orange to represent the searing heat of the sun.

“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.” ― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath