Time moves slowly in the dark kitchen, smell of synthetic apple cinnamon wax melt heavy in the air, the scent a bulwark against the ghosts of the mind, a rampart against the passage of time. Outside, along the old country roads north of town, to the West, gray clouds gather and, further beyond, a luminous band of hazy apricot sky. Light and day are dying at once and the atmosphere is quiet, sacred, attending of the death along with the old cedars standing at attention, pallbearers of the day.
In the big box stores we crowd together, herd animals all, all beneath artificial light, the babble of the crowd unable to prevent the tension, the anxiety of the passage, the sense that tomorrow is lost and losing and dying again and there's not a single thing we can do about. We crowd together, angry, anxious, unable to explain why. The self-checkouts beep incessantly.
The day is dying. Late evening sun traces over top tree rafters of the grand old maples in the yard, the day's hazy orange light reflecting off old windows, old ranch home windows, dining room windows and living room windows, windows as eyes, eyes through which three generations of children looked out. In the driveway, on the gravel, a man stands, arms folded, staring at the dying day. He was once one of those children. He was once a child with infinite dreams. His parents built this house, once his home. Moments inside him are dying as well, just as his parents died. His eyes aren't what they once were, eyeglasses reflecting the day's last light just like windows, windows from which he looks out, as he once did, as a child. Flannel arms fold over flabby middle.
Light rain begins, that light and soft rain that comes at dusk just as the last clouds clear. Thickets in the forest darken. Raindrops form on the blooms of a late autumn rose, pink and luscious petals closed but full. Life is the part that happens when nobody notices. An uncharacteristically bright evening rainbow graces the East. Sacred thoughts and profane align at the crossroads again, as they always have. Secret thoughts and unspoken words are again mouthed by ghosts in a century-and-a-half-old house with crooked walls and old, old quilts.
Outside, prairie grass stands high in the grader ditch, herald to the elm, dead and silhouetted by memory, all black against the sky. The old fences seem to go on forever, tracing farm yard memories long forgotten but harshly ending where arborvitae and treated-wood barrier mark the intrusion of suburb, hundreds of silent cookie-cutter houses all with identical roof-lines.
Not far off, time moves slowly over Deacon John Matthews' grave. Matthews, hanged on the town square for his part in the Edens' Cabin Massacre. Matthews, whose dying wish was to be buried in the tiny wrought-iron plot off the corner of his front porch, next to the graves of his children. The old cabin is long gone, the front yard a shallow dirt road for four-wheelers barreling through the Mark Twain Forest. This hollow is beautiful, lonely, a deep valley over which the moon arcs, and time again moves slowly forever in the soft autumn night.
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