Trying to wake up

Beautiful Country,

I'm stilted today. wanting to write you and having no real words of my own.  I'm drained out with nothing left to say to you except that you've put us through a long winter and I'd like you to wake up.  

I've been really bothered by the things you ask us to give up but I think that is a different letter.  I have been looking and looking for some sign that you are going to come back to us that you're going to shake off this cold blanket of dirty snow and send us green and feeling again.  Sometimes I think there are signs of you waking up a southern breeze here and a tiny  green thing there but then you sleep on.

We keep looking for you but we're tired now and frayed around the edges like the flags in town that you seem so fond of whipping until their seams come out and their threads, screaming for independence, work themselves into unruly fringes.  The wind keeps shifting direction once an hour, three times in a day, changing every twenty minutes - always blowing around us so that nothing every clears away from here, it all just stays and swirls around our faces, blowing into our eyes and gritting on our thoughts like sand in our teeth.  Where are you?

Where is your green?  Where is your even temperament?  Earlier this winter you were drowsy and quiet now you flail and kick like you're taken with some sort of hellish frigid fever.  Get up!  We've planted, we've planned, we've set down our hopes in the thin soil, covered them over, and we're praying for you to turn warm and makes our lives grow again.  We're waiting for you to open up and send the birds back, send blue damsel flies and pompous blackbirds through the cattails that nod hello to trucks going out to fields.  We're waiting for raucous crowds of sunflowers and legions of their ant gardeners to pile out onto the roadsides winking and waving as we drive into town for sundries and water and parts and a reminder of why we've loved you so long and so deep.

Where are you?  The brome rattles in the ditches without seeds and without life - all the heads are translucent and empty, waiting.  Even the grasses have done their planting and planning and you've still now woken.  I am your alarm clock - the constant call for you to start your work, to rise up and meet the needs around you, to pour yourself out and give.  Where are you storing the warm temperatures that will bring up the wheat like a fine green fuzz on these gumbo hills?  Where are you hiding the sun that will coax volunteer grape hyacinth out from under the eaves and around the base of my lilac trees?  Don't you see us waiting for you?


We are beaten by the wind! parched and laid down to the ground.  We're blown about and kept awake at night by the moving of house walls under the push of the gusts.  Are they still gusts if they are the most present thing?  The wind blows and blows but the clouds stay; there's no sky to be seen but no rain to encourage the seeds that are waiting for their cue beneath your skin.  Where are you?  Where are you Where are you Where are you?

What we give up to stay

Hello Beautiful Country, 

  You are unkind. You seem to be in the habit of taking.  I think it must be part of the cold; you are venomous, and seething.  Why?  There have been so many tears lately.  You leave us with holes where our guts should be, torn edges where there used to be whole hearts that beat determined to love your mood swings and even your harshness.  Now you seem mean.

You seem determined to destroy your own love affair.  I have been  captivated by that part of you that won't be tilled or tied down or made to bear seed; I have loved the soft edged wildness of the mornings you bring, when there are deer grumbling before breakfast and the puddles in the road hold reflections of the sky so still I could fall into them.  We have all loved you and now you seem petulant, striking out at us and pushing us away.  You're childish, mean, and set on grinding down the lives that have been spent lovingly watching you age, as though love can be proved by enduring the worst of insults and the deepest of hurts only to remain. You act as though a heavy heart and tear streaked face are better proof of love than the determined presence of unerringly patient generations that have weathered your moods and brimstone with long suffering eyes and determined strides.

You have brought us heavy hearts and tear stained faces.  Do you feel satisfied?  Is there a darker part of you that will feel justified if we now leave?  Will you tell yourself you were right and watch as we leave our loved ones buried in your skin, turning to dust and take the living down the long road over your hills to places less fickle and less gouging?      Do you know what you cost us?  To stay with you is a sacrifice; a daily offering of burned alternatives made by mothers and daughters who marry the fathers and sons here because we are all struck by your beauty.  Struck dumb by your possibility we stay here to till relationships into your soils and raise tiny ones who love you, who run hopeful across your shoulders wondering at the breadth and the length of your endlessness, your ageless grace, the beauty of your brutality.

That brutality that requires additional sacrifice.  I can only speak for myself, but I know that you have taken from me.  I gave willingly - i GIVE willingly.  But you have taken.

We give up our perspective to stay with you, telling ourselves that this is the life all were meant to live; telling ourselves that this is the good life and that the parts of us that go missing were not so well intentioned or kind or lovable as the parts that remain.  We tell ourselves that the calluses that develop from holding you close and hanging on to you in your fits and rages show our determination and our resolve rather than our inability to change and our fear of seeking out other means of living.

We lay down things we had laid away for lean days; telling ourselves that there will be other resources in those days.  That there will be other provisions, other times to rest up, replenish and renew.  And part of us believes that.  Part of us believes, even as you take from us the things we laid by to sustain us, that you will be merciful and good to us.  Part of us believes that your stripping us is a sign of your affection, a mark of your wisdom, and a badge of honor if we can stand up to it all.

We stop maintaining lines of communication with acquaintances, then colleagues, then friends, and finally, family.  slowly you isolate us and bind us into your silence as we toil to understand you and predict your moods believing that if we can only spend another season with you we can better provide for the lives around us and parlay our love for you into the rewards we dream of delivering to our families.  You sell us on dreams of bountiful harvests and full bins, of thankful children and adoring partners, of bills paid and time well spent and all the while you are working us into the dust we plow and plant with expectation and hope.  

The only things you grow well are memories of empty places at the dinner table, of missing parents, time spent wrestling a life from your dirt and being asked to pay for every inch of ground we gain. You accept cash check and hope as payment for the lives you provide, draining funds and faith until we stand with empty hearts in empty pockets still breathing in the sagebrush scent that drew us every day out of our homes and into your presence to worship at your clay feet.  

You walk us away from each other and into the knowledge that our loved ones sleep under your skin.  They lay down  and enrich your soil so that where you choose to be green you can be greener and, catching our eyes, make us believe that things could be different for us and our families.  Those that die here amplify the songs of timothy grass and sage, Indian paintbrush and liatris watching with sightless eyes as the hours tick away to their own time for sleep and their muscles tire.  

Those of us that are left wring our hands and wait for our own time.  Having no relief from you we pray that angels will watch us, that some mercy from outside this place will bring the grace our children need to forgive us for house spent away, for things missed, for words spoken in anger at a life that we didn't write and couldn't change because we knew nothing else and had never wanted anything but you.

Years go by in this cycle of working, and plying you for peace, burying what we lose and planting again.  We lose track of time and generations go by without  stopping, without a reprieve from the burdens you heap down on us.  Why?  Why this?  Why do we stay?  Why are we so captivated by you when you are so hard and so misleading?  You take from us what we barely possess and yet we are so enamored of you we pass the tradition on to sons and daughters as though you are the rarest treasure.  Why?

This winter there were those who lost themselves. We watched as they smiled and dried up, waiting for the wind to blow them away.  We held their hands and prayed and begged and bargained and did all we could to ease them into places that would be more restful and less....less you, beautiful country.  Less harsh, less work, less disappointing.  Now they're with you anyway.  In the end we tried to ease them away from you, to give them space to breathe and put down roots somewhere else.  In the end it was being without you that made them give up.  Even in the end you take from us.

R.I.P - MBL, DCM, KET, EES, ELW, 

Goodbye - DAW, DKS, OMK, NCR, KJSE, JMG

Nothing Else To Say

Good Morning Beautiful Country,

There is nothing else to say.

 

The Kitchen Sink

Hello Beautiful Country,

There are so many strange things about you but today you strike me as a mobius strip of changeless alterations.  You are eternally accepting new lives onto your rolling back; we build our little settlements here and there, trying to shore up what we can never hold on to.  

 

Over time we are shaken loose by time and trials and we leave the places we settled.  We surrender them to the wind and the dust and your more constant companions, birds and forbes and grasses.  We leave you.  And then the cycle begins again.

I wonder sometimes if you are happy to see us go.  If you feel a relief at your solitude or if there is a bitter taste as we pack up and trundle down the highways we cut into your skin.  Do you wonder where we go or do you already know?  Your hills ripple like back muscles and sometimes it feels like you are shaking us off; maybe we got too close and you couldn't stand to be fully seen, maybe sometimes you gutteral 'good riddance' in our direction when we never really put forth the effort of knowing you in your tempermentality and harshness.

Whatever the reason, we go.  We leave our tilling and our gardens, our lilacs and apple trees; we take the clothes we pulled in one way or another from your dust.  I wonder if, as you break into the old houses and storerooms, you hear stories from the things we leave behind; bedsteads, paint chips, kitchen sinks and bathroom tubs, heaters that used to warm us while you howled outside. 

Maybe you and they both knew we'd leave.  Maybe your lifted voice outside the door was raging at our disloyalty or maybe you were hollering for us to pack it in faster.  Maybe it was both at the same time. 

You must laugh at our locked doors.  

Even now I look through the places where the locks should hold secure and hold only blades of last year's grass carried by mice and the breeze.  It was never you we were trying to keep out; you shouldn't take it so personally that we locked our doors and windows.  But you do.  

You open the windows with hail and the doors with time and reclaim the spaces that we built to shelter us from you.

   

  You blend the inside and outside spaces, softening our hard edges and sharpening the soft ones.  You do such beautiful things, like opening a wardrobe door so that expectant sparrows can build homes on crown molding and in the corners of door frames.  

 

I think I'll never see anything lovelier than tiny eggs sleeping, patient and expectant, under timothy grass covers in the deep shadows of a wardrobe top shelf.

I love you for being in each of these ramshackle, entropy stricken, old places.  I love you for pushing grass up through the kitchen linoleum, and for pushing ice crystals through the remnants of piping below floor boards that are being renovated into flowers and lichen.

  

I love you for the bundle of feathers hanging off of electrical wiring that dangles from the ceiling like a forlorn fettuccine, the whole thing looking like an angel wing beaded onto a cord.   

I love you for the bare bones beauty of rust and blue grama grass napping together in a corner; for the joke you make out of sturdy boards and 'stainless' steel construction. 

 I love you for reclaiming the little patches of your back that we tilled and pinched and prodded into a form more like ourselves.

  

Out of rot you bring beauty; a rush of wings.  A  fallen wall and a broken window both bear testimony to the fact that even in your quiet you move. 

Hoar Frost and Snow Cones

Hello Beautiful Country,

You are quiet and still today; I wonder what you are thinking; I wonder what you are waiting for. 

  
 
Where do your thoughts wander as the layers of hoar frost build up on the trees and grasses, as the jagged crystals grow larger and larger and you cover all of us with thick fog in the morning and biting cold at night?  

 


 Part of you must be thinking of art.  You paint in water and you sculpt in water.  Part of you must be contemplating each crystal, your own version of the Mona Lisa, a reflection of yourself and yet something completely different.  

 

Does it sadden you that you gild your masterpieces in sunlight that warms and washes them away?  Do you rejoice in the darkest hours of the night, the ones filled with fog and promise, because they allow you to rebuild and reclaim each stroke that the sun washed away.   How strange it must be to have a that sort of relationship with a star.  Do you ever think about it that way?

  This must be how you entertain yourself until you can bring out all the green and growing things.

Wisdom and Iron Oxide

Hello Beautiful Country,

You're dusty today.  Dry and parched like an old man winded from too much lying during a game of dominoes.  Are you listening? or are you too busy changing? You change so fast lately, in the morning cool and damp and green and by noon you are wrinkled and blowing away. I think, conveniently enough, in my next life I would like to be dust; I could sit on housewives shelves and listen to their secret gossip, watch them watch their stories and maybe the odd pool boy or two, move on through a swiffer cloth into a great den of cultural archaeology that most people call the dump.  I wouldn't stay there. I would travel on the five year old feet of a future Nobel laureate into a library where I would stay, preferably somewhere between the childrens' section where I could hear story hour, and the meeting rooms where great minds discuss great things like knitting patterns, new books, and the growth of tiny humans. 

Dust is the great hitch hiker; the eternal transient, the nearly nothing nomad, and I would just move and move and move. 

 Beautiful Country, I think parts of you are less changing, more patient and sentient than the gypsy dust that moves county to county never stopping to contribute a crop, or a firm foundation for a home. I think parts of you have been watching us for years; parts of you I will call friend.

 Hello Friend.  You look comforting to me today, somewhere between a Bill Peet character and a Greek philosopher.  Thank you for being here.  Thank you for bearing witness to the winters and the summers, the muddy springs and the gone-in-a-blink autumns.  With age comes wisdom and iron oxide.

 

Open your mouth and tell me your stories.  Let me sit on your knee and hear about families gone by, loves gone dry and blown away, battles fought that never mattered, smiles exchanged on country roads that led to homes filled with futures and babies and love and tears and laughter and days and days of working toward a little peace.  Which did? the roads or the smiles?...didn't both?

I see you're still active, still participating and donating to the community. Tell me about your retirement, about the folks that call you home and about the generations that have come to you and through you in an endless parade of living and dying that turns up the dust and sends it out on its Odyssey.  Even now you house a hodgepodge crew of the vilified, the mundane, the under overlooked; ones I see and a million I don't.  So many I never will.

You're quiet today.  I suppose there is no rush to talk when so few stop to listen and the wind seems to be the only one who answers back.  I'll answer back.  Teach me your lessons.  The ones you learned in the rain and as the snow blew up and over you; the ones you learned while you worked 'til the wheels came off.  I come today seeking wisdom and iron oxide. You have both.

Bound for Convolvulus arvensis

Hello beautiful country,

I walked through you today, I laid belly down on you and breathed in deep of the humus and humidity that hung around the ground you are; I pointed my mechanical eye up into your bluest layers and snapped memories that caught light and sound and breath and will keep me mindful of when I was young. 

Today you were full of bird song; I could smell plants growing. Today your trees were full of cow birds and black birds; loud scrabble gabbing calling and falling forward then back through branches that were beginning to crisp from too much summer sun.  Cow birds partnering, squabbling, and separating - how like them we are.  Black birds, the girls shy and flittish, the males bright and loud trilling and warbling their red wing song hoping to stand out.

 

 I took a dozen steps and found a thousand differences.  A stone throw away from the bright morning glory bound fence posts was a bone dry road, stark and rocky with scrap metal sulking under a thin layer of infertile dust, waiting to pop tires and make morning errands into afternoon frustrations; bits of barbed wire aged and wise, parts of balers and combines that fell off long ago leaving locals puzzled and short on time in fields full of harvestable crops.  

  I trailed a pair of honeymooning hawks like the little sister who doesn't want to be left out of older sibling adventures.   They were probably out looking for a nesting site, a little two room flat that would house a nursery for chicks.  They'll celebrate later by having a rabbit dinner and clear cool water from the creek below the flat.

Their babies will grow up watching damselflies dog fight through green cat tails and timothy grass, they'll watch pheasants strut through the bromegrass like guerillas searching for slow grasshoppers and dozing damselflies.  

Beautiful country how can you hold so much?  How can you not burst from being so full?  The sounds, the smells, the light and dust and moving and stillness that all happen at the same times inside your boundaries as the whole world looks inside, how to you hold it all?