The beat-up red pickup turns hard at the crossroads, kicking up dust between the grain elevators and the white-and-red gas station. Worn pickup truck, worn blacktop, paint peels white and gray and brown from sentinel-like, castle-like grain elevators, centerpieces of another town most couldn’t care to remember.
The river is not far off, black rushing ribbon cutting through far western ragged edges of the Ozarks. Turn right for Kansas, left to Arkansas. Oklahoma stretches far off to the setting sun. Against the bright, a storm rolls in. Tall fescue and cottonwoods shiver. Bedsheets and britches flap on the line. The cattle move uneasily.
Culture is a weird word, a word denoting something high brow, something with snooty people and fine pearls. Truth is, culture is the life that happens when you're not looking, like the afternoon sun refracting through old drinking glasses, drinking glasses full of sweet tea or bourbon, glasses on old yellow tables, glasses that have felt the countless touch of generations now dead. Culture is the magic of the forgotten, the magic of the overlooked. My heart has always been soft for such things, the things that are all-too-often ignored, thrown away, mocked.
There is heart and soul in the worn out toy left fading in the overgrown grassy yard, heart and soul that cannot be seen or understood unless you have heart and soul of your own. Life is painful for the true poets, the ones who cry.
Even as the storm moves north, the breeze plays uneasily in the brown leaves of an ash tree, a tree dying of ash borers, showers of brown leaves falling as though autumn has already arrived. Ash trees were sacred once, the patron home of magic and fey, not that anybody believes such things anymore. This insect-born disease has moved inexorably from the East, killing off the ash trees, just as Dutch elm disease did a generation ago, just as the chestnut blight did before that. Life is funny that way, as is death, sudden, expected, surprising, inexorable, predictable.
The wind changes again, afternoon sun turning the sky to a weird cyan blue, pale and cold despite the summer heat. Another town, another series of edifices, red brick hymns to a past empire age, a towering age of red Masonic roses, abbeys of commerce, monuments of railroading American triumphalism. There is magic in dusty small towns, and in old and musty movie theaters, places in the dark where the fairy lights of Hollywood still flicker bright. In the theater the dark is safe for it is in the dark where no one can see you cry.
A setting sun, a rising sun, another chance, another life, another generation. The sun is once again over the river where the bottomlands are thick with green, thick with fledgling elm too young to be yet touched by disease. Is it sunset or sunrise? I no longer know, can no longer tell. Perhaps it no longer matters. I do not care as it is sun over a world long ago, in a place where I once again believed in my childhood America. I raise my eyes skyward and give thanks, thanks for no place, for one place, and a new, old day once again, where hope and promises surreal and impossible and yet unborn still live.
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