Little Town

One thing that always inspires me to get out both the pen and the camera is a little town. I find myself there quite a bit -- when I forget to put gas in the car before leaving town, if I have a flat tire, when I'm on one of my never-ending quests to find the shortest distance between two places (tangent: ever read "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut"? A great story, and one that gives me pause as I'm wandering backroads).

Anyway, there's something beautiful and sad about these towns. Whether it's Leonardville or Green or Jamestown or Dorchester or Friend or Oketo or Walnut or Glasco or Herkimer or Keats, you can see what the town once was, even as it stands slowly crumbling, like beautiful bones beneath a scarred face. They all feel a little bit the same, almost like being home again; the sidewalks feel familiar, even when they aren't. The same broken paned windows, the same grocery store Safe-Way signs, the same pigweed growing up at the curb of the uncleaned street. At the same time, it feels unreal, like walking onto the set of Hoosiers.

Here are some shots from recent small town wanderings. Certainly there will be more.

Excerpt - "I'm Caught Doing it Again and Have to Explain"

There is something about a field of wheat that is irresistible to me. It isn't the sight of it, weaving and swaying under the south wind in June, just starting to turn gold. And it isn't just the whisper it makes, each head leaned in and conspiring with the next, like a 160-acre game of Telephone. It isn't that dusty smell that the chaff has in July or the damp fecundity of spring rows.

This is a case where the sum is truly more than the parts. Wheat is ever-present in my memories of childhood -- sleeping in the back window of the combine during harvest at age 3, awakening to watch the wheat pile higher and higher in the hopper window; taking a small handful of wheat and chewing, chewing, chewing, until it made a kind of gluten gum; breaking off the stalk for an impromptu straw for my Grape Ne-Hi; counting germinated seed wheat that my father unrolled from an old t-shirt rag while a blizzard raged outside; learning to work the fields and plant, as soon as my legs were long enough to push the tractor clutch.

Roadside wheat fields always were and remain synced to my internal calendar. I miss the smell of the soil and the intimacy that I once had with our farm. Part of me wants it back; part of me wonders if its possible to recover. But the memories of it never seem to fade. And that's what this poem is about.

Excerpt from "I'm Caught Doing It Again and Have to Explain"

...sometimes I find myself at Tractor Supply, almost
like sleep-walking, and I realize I'm running my fingers down
the stacks of the starched denim Big Smith and Key overalls.
That's the kind my dad wore, and don't laugh
but I have a pair in the bottom drawer, size 42, huge,
I found them at Goodwill and couldn't leave them.
They still had some alfalfa chaff in the top pocket lint.
That's like a metaphor, right? You can take those overalls,
wash them, dry them, fold them up and take them to town,
they've still got hay in the pockets, you know?
You get it? Hay in the pockets.