Poems have never been something I've gravitated to naturally with my writing. I prefer verbose novellas. I can't seem to condense everything I want to say into a poem, but within the last year their appeal has worn me down and every now and then I find myself writing some. Granted, I write many more when I'm required to in my college creative writing classes, and then drift away from them when I'm not in class, but then there'll be that shock of inspiration like a jagged bolt of lightning weaving to earth, searching with its prodding finger for something to strike...and then it does, and it happens to be the tree above you, and you're filled with its pulsating white noise and can't help but let it escape you through the pen, through the pores in your mind. And later on you'll go back and think, how did I think of that?
Such was the case when I was doing last night's supper dishes. The first few whispers of a poem drifted around in my mind like blizzards of dust flying up when the dog flops onto the couch, and you watch them, perhaps try to grasp them but your fingers only brush against your skin, capturing nothing. With one more dish to do I abandoned the luke-warm, almost sud-free water and put pen to paper, scribbling a few lines on a randomly turned empty notebook page. Later on, after I'd finished the dishes, I went to my laptop and translated my less than stellar handwriting and worked on the poem further.
But I can't truthfully say the poem was all random, because it was actually inspired from a snippet of a paragraph in a story thought I worked on a couple weeks prior. Said paragraph went like this: "The wheat field behind the historic storefronts whispers to me in a thousand voices, the century's old maple and birch trees bordering the apartment whisper back. As a child I had wondered if God could hear nature whispering to him, their divine creator. If the field's and trees whispered in a million voices, could God hear and respond to them all? What about the crashing waves and the screaming tempest? The spray of sand and the delicate sway of wildflowers?"
As you may've guessed from that paragraph, the main character, Henrietta, in that particular novella, is remarkably like me. I wonder the same things, and much of my inner wondering's transfer themselves into the minds of my characters. But I believe that every character a writer creates each parts of herself/himself in them. Which I think is the beauty of it! Fiction is a beautiful thing. As one author put it "I love creating worlds on paper." That is exactly what we as writer's are doing, and I know I will never tire of it!
Before I digress into yet another rambling blog post about writing, I will post my poem below. It has the same title as this week's blog post. I love the title of the poem, for it provokes thought and makes one pause. Which is something I always aim for when creating titles.
A Whispered Shout
Undulating sea of gold
shivers upon a hillside,
summer's heat folds down,
a wool coat breaking free,
smothering the curious child
who broke it from its tomb.
Plumes of dust swirling like
blizzards breathed from the
decaying mouth of time itself
dance in yellowed light sifting
through wavy windowpane.
A whispered slithers, each voice
contained within matching
field's fluid motion, seeking
rhythm, a point to their whisperings.
Each stalk parts, crushes, sways
and bends, whispers escalate,
climbing the hill until it curls back upon
itself, what falling forward, casting out
the voices. They move on.
Dense and rutted sentinels watch the fields
dance, lifting their myriad layered skirts high,
flashing a length of toned thigh, or intricate
garter aching for a rough finger and a sly grin.
Their whisperings ring deeper, starting at the heart
and weaving along veins thick and thin until the end
they reach, bursting forth into the solid wind where
they float aimlessly. Sliding, stumbling in summer heat
the voices mix with rock and clay tumbling over the lip
of the earth, the wind the tongue that cleans it from
its teeth which bare themselves within snarling
tempest below. They splinter against jagged rock,
smooth surfaces slick with transparent blood,
sand shifted and drenched, an expensive dress
Pulled by wind, soaked by rain, no regard given.
The whispers reach out in spray of white
against earth's crater edge, in the greedy
gathering of water pulled beneath the folds
of foamy black water like devil's liquor only
to be hastily thrown back in crazed arch of
white. Is the water made holy again? Again
it melds with darkness below, perhaps
catching its reflection, and resigning itself.
Outline of days lived off land captured
only by delicate lace of rust clinging to
nothing, scent of churned earth a memory,
wind weaving in and out, in and out, steady
fingers of soft wrinkles mending another patch.
Chains, straps, bolts and buckles tossed amidst
solemn country silence, whispers of dense bones
buried far away, perhaps wind is steady cold
of hooves leading from barn to freshly plowed field.
These skeletons of rust can plow no more, their
only purpose to watch rainbows dance gaily above,
each growing higher, each bursting forth like bands
of color staining sky's swollen clouds, an angry splinter
of lightning revealing summer's beauty beyond,
lightning fades, thunder recoils, whispers can return.
Petals arch outward, overlapping one another, worshipers
crowded together, each reaching out in wild abandon.
Here wind plays, sawing on summer's violin, plucking
the steel facade of the banjo. Then a burst of wind,
fresh from its wheat field frolic, dives within the
field's blooming heart. As it dips to soil
long abandoned by pointed tongs of metal
and blunt impact of hooves it looks above,
imagining the blended watercolor of flowers
forming a canopy above to be umbrellas of
every color gathered together, grinning children
below, their rubber-clad feet sloshing in puddles.
Sun dips through, a curious finger melding the
painting, colors bleeding into one another,
marring light purple, creating another one.
This is the whisper the wind has been waiting for.
for it is the true whisper of summer. A lone
string is pulled back, a single chord struck upon wood.
All the whispers rise to a singular voice, dancing above and below.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
The Greatest Thief
What are your thoughts of seeing abandoned, dilapidated buildings? Do you shy away in uneasiness and perhaps slight fear? Do you slap your thigh, irritated you forgot your camera? Do instantly creep in closer, your very skin itching at the fingertips to brush paint-stripped wood, to feel the deep ruts in its surface like wrinkles etched deep into an elders skin, each a worn path of a life fading quickly, old times that are now captured by shaking fingers, raspy gravel-bottomed voice, watery eyes whose very color seems to be slowly sucked out by the myriad red veins weaving across them. Or do you perhaps simply drive on by? Never noticing the humble, crumbling structure being reclaimed to the earth which it was so long ago wrought from. Albeit we all have our interests and hobbies, I would encourage you not to overlook these crumbling beauties, even if you only glance at them for a second. Try to grasp their story, the reason for their desecrated state. Look at the surrounding landscape, what can it tell you about the building's condition? How far is leaning downhill, how many fingertips does the porch still cling to the house's facade with? How many windowpanes are missing like a broken picket fence, or a hillbilly's blackened smile? How pronounced is the sag of the roof? The back of an old mare who has carried more than her weight in a long lifetime, now put out to pasture, purpose and meaning behind her, lazy days of lush grass and fattened bees buzzing overhead now unfold before her.
For some you may be thinking, "it's an old building. Why the heck would I pay it any notice? And in all truth, I can't force you, or anyone, to give even a moment's notice to such abandoned places. But like I said, perhaps you should. Not to observe the blatant, sometimes harsh and agonizingly tedious cycle of life for not only rural buildings like barns but any building in general, not even for the dark and - for me anyway - intensely appealing and inspiration beauty that a dilapidated building has to offer, but for this simple truth: time is the greatest thief.
In many of my poetry, when I decide to write poems that is, I revert back to the topic of abandoned buildings. Mainly abandoned barns, farmhouses, houses in general and ghost towns. For me, whenever I see such things and my eyes instantly lock in place, like a spinning wheel amidst the Vegas show lights and flashy jewelry and smiles landing on that perfect spot, winning you the big bucks. My mind imagines the story behind that building, how did it become abandoned? What weaves amongst the half-broken windows? What makes the floorboards creak? I yearn to run my fingers across wooden siding smoothed and rutted by time, to peer past the dusty, wavy windowpanes like the fogged and watery eyes of the elderly, capturing a portal to the past, but offering no glimpse of the present. Perhaps this stems from my ability to view an old house only once and be able to retain it in memory and build an entire novella around it. Old houses are the axle that send the caboose of my writing down the steep embankment. They are the strong heart pumping thick, fresh blood through my veins when they dry up and become flat like hair on a sticky summer afternoon.
I'm sure I've talked about it before but on the way to my great aunt's farm in Daggett, Michigan there are abandoned houses and entire farms scattered alongside the highway like true rubies and diamonds tossed inadvertently from a car, exposed to the elements, scratched by time's greedy finger, fogged by its potent breath until it is a ghost of its former self, a constantly thinning shell that houses nothing but the air which breathes in and out of its many openings. My aunt was explaining how each of these places came to be abandoned, and of course I was interested in every tale. I would give anything to learn the true stories behind the houses which I so fleetingly glimpse through the window of my car, but now that I think about it. Perhaps it's better not to know, for my imagination would become a mere vapor, lingering swirls of cigarette smoke hanging in a room stripped of everything, yet the past remaining, too deeply embedded to ever be torn away. For even as the blood drains the veins remain, as does the heart and the dry riverbed leading to the shrinking sea. There is always something that remains, even when there seems nothing is left for it to cling to.
A while back, in the early nineties I believe, there was a man who photographed a certain farmhouse somewhere in the countryside for a decade or so in each season. In the first photograph the farmhouse was occupied and the farm used regularly. In the second photo it had been abandoned, the photo had been taken some five years later I believe. Obvious changes had already occurred. The once uniform, sharp coat of white paint the house donned like the precisely ironed uniform a nurse would wear was now marred by strips of wood showing beneath. Time was peeling back the layers like an onion being peeled to the rotted core, or a child innocently licking a sucker, his tongue red with candy, oblivious to the sharp spike waiting to pierce it just below the bubbled surface. The out buildings had suffered the same fate, their metal roofs rusted and sagging. The third and final photo was taken in the fall, showing some trees cleared in an adjacent field, as well as the house's two-tiered porch slowly leaning away, like a mother turning away from her misbehaving child, shame etched into her face by a red cloak. Great bald patches of paintless siding snarled at the camera, out buildings bore roofs of red rust appearing to mimic the fall foliage in perhaps a last attempt at beauty, a cry for help.
It's sad really, to see a house fall to shambles like that, nevertheless an entire farm. For at one point, no matter if it a decade, a century or a mere three years ago that any place was abandoned, you know there was a hard-working family living there, earning a paycheck, cooking family meals, holding raucous bridge games on Sunday night. Now all of those things are distant memories, viewed through the telescope with the cracked lenses that's just short of bringing everything into focus. There was a house on the way to my aunt's farm that for the longest time was pretty much intact. If I remember correctly, it had been struck by lightning sometime ago. Well, prior to my most recent visit, I hadn't been out in quite some time and anxiously scanned the right side of the road, recalling the house sat at the bottom of a hill. I had remembered most of the roof being caved in and a pile of its own materials sitting in the middle of the four walls like shoveling dirt into your own grave, but upon seeing it on that particular trip I found out that not only did the four walls cave in, but also the roof. My heart had deflated instantly, perhaps mimicking the house's demise, trying to capture what it felt like for it to give that final sigh and feel its own weight fall against it, enclosing it like arms being folded over a hardened, cold body as its lowered into the ground. It had looked to be a beautiful bungalow-style home at one time, but is now a heaping pile of rubble, just like the neighbor's barn across from my aunt's farm.
The green-shingled roof sits atop broken-off and splintered siding and a remarkably newer looking concrete-block foundation. It's a shabby blanket perhaps, thrown over a starving street animal, a small gesture of comfort. Or it could be a moss-layered, floppy hat disguising a cancer-stricken scalp below, hiding its rawest truths from reality, from the prying eye. I remember when that barn was standing, the roof would repeatedly sag further and further inward while the outer opposite edges bulged outward until I thought it would explode at both ends, spewing grayed, wooden siding like a baseball greedily knocking teeth out of its way. But the roof simply proved too great a weight and it fell against the foundation like a flattened pancake smacking against the concrete, having slipped from the spatula. It was ruined, irrevocable. Thankfully my aunt's own barn, albeit not in use save for a friend of hers who carves wood in it, is still standing strong and humbly against the Midwestern sky. I find the barn fascinating for many reasons, but mostly because of the simple fact that it's a barn, and it's old.
Perhaps when I mentioned of time being the greatest thief you didn't automatically think of the effect it has on buildings but instead thought of how it affects your life. But that's for another blog post entirely, and ironically I find i can relate better to this one, than if I were to write the other. Maybe it's not ironic at all thought, for like I said, We all have different ways we view the world, and different things we gravitate to and let pull our attention.
I have seen many an abandoned barn in my lifetime, and fiercely wish I could photograph them all, but one thing I have yet to see are ghost towns. Now ghost towns hold their own fascination for me. For it isn't just one family and one lifestyle that has left the buildings they once lived in like a loon's cry dissipating into the morning's thick fog lacing the thin air, it's an entire community, perhaps hundreds of families full of bustling children, apron-donning wives and hard-working men that for a while enjoyed the luxury of that perpetually spinning Vegas wheel landing on the jackpot every time, the continuous whir of its arc was the clink of axes against stone, the chatter of children rising and falling, the crack of eggs, the giggles of gossip and desire, the soft whisper of gold and silver, the scrape of bills flying from finger to register...until that click became the fire of a shot gun, the ending of an era, the deflating of a dream raining down like shrapnel, piercing everything, running the veins dry, bleeding out the heart. Imagine a ghost town sitting in the middle of a valley, darkened, paint less buildings rising unsteadily and parched from the earth like scabs barely covering wounds which will never heal. Perhaps a few yellowed pages still flab in the post office, or a crooked screen door swings on its unoiled hinges, beckoning its old friend the wind to come and play, to push the rocking chair, to open the windows, to pluck a tune on the dusty piano keys. When was last call at the saloon? Is the wind pushing over cobweb-draped stool the ghost of a drunk still trying to reach home, formulating an excuse in his mind to feed the wife, apologizes laced with liquor and perhaps a hint of the inevitable ending of it all?
But for as much as time steels from such places, it is frozen within them as well. For perhaps as much as it continually takes, it cannot help but give back, to stay awhile. There was a poem I wrote earlier this year I believe that revolved around a fictional ghost town. I've chosen to end with that. If you've ever photographed an abandoned house, ghost town, or barn, or simply witnessed one huddled deep in the woods or the crook of a valley alongside a rural highway, I would love to hear your story. As you can tell, I could talk about such things all day! You, the readers of my blog, have that same right.
Another Ghost Town Lives On
by Corrina
Each building bears a
sagging facade. Darkened
by time, stripped by wind's
raspy breath stealing over
jagged teeth lining the hills.
Roof lines mimicking the
curve of the valley beyond.
Three letters vanished
from the sign once boasting
the word saloon. Drunks no more.
Yellowed squares of paper
scrape along the post office floor.
Screen doors bang open
pleading for one more delivery
of letters from men far from home.
Riches once flowed freely,
through dirt roads and calloused hands.
Gold was the word that birthed this town,
springing it from the very dirt that now
wears its skin thin, bringing death closer.
Titled stones fight for existence
amidst a labyrinth of weeds and
old beer cans. They are as worn as the town
which once sustained the people
buried below, forgotten by the world.
If they had known their beloved
town would one day be no more,
would they have so eagerly built
up homes and businesses?
Rushing an undiscovered frontier?
A faded wooden tractor sits upon
a sill, beside a headless teddy bear.
Pale sunlight weaving through cracks
in rotten clapboards the only thing
left reaching out to touch, to acknowledge.
Rutted roads cling to the feel
of wagon wheels digging in.
Leaning porches whisper of times
when the broken chairs would
patiently wait for a tired soul.
A one-room schoolhouse
dominates the only hill.
Tiny voices laughing gaily,
feet and books shuffling.
It is only the wind.
Is the wind the only living
thing amongst these sleeping
relics? The last to pick a tune
upon cracked piano keys, or
slip into a pew within the church?
Sunlight comes in early morning,
to dance beside the wind.
To fade another family picture and
steal moisture from house's bones.
They are like children playing amongst graves.
It is a town dying a slow death,
despite its lifeblood so swiftly torn
from its veins. The main road cuts
through like a splintered spine,
another ghost town lives on.
For some you may be thinking, "it's an old building. Why the heck would I pay it any notice? And in all truth, I can't force you, or anyone, to give even a moment's notice to such abandoned places. But like I said, perhaps you should. Not to observe the blatant, sometimes harsh and agonizingly tedious cycle of life for not only rural buildings like barns but any building in general, not even for the dark and - for me anyway - intensely appealing and inspiration beauty that a dilapidated building has to offer, but for this simple truth: time is the greatest thief.
In many of my poetry, when I decide to write poems that is, I revert back to the topic of abandoned buildings. Mainly abandoned barns, farmhouses, houses in general and ghost towns. For me, whenever I see such things and my eyes instantly lock in place, like a spinning wheel amidst the Vegas show lights and flashy jewelry and smiles landing on that perfect spot, winning you the big bucks. My mind imagines the story behind that building, how did it become abandoned? What weaves amongst the half-broken windows? What makes the floorboards creak? I yearn to run my fingers across wooden siding smoothed and rutted by time, to peer past the dusty, wavy windowpanes like the fogged and watery eyes of the elderly, capturing a portal to the past, but offering no glimpse of the present. Perhaps this stems from my ability to view an old house only once and be able to retain it in memory and build an entire novella around it. Old houses are the axle that send the caboose of my writing down the steep embankment. They are the strong heart pumping thick, fresh blood through my veins when they dry up and become flat like hair on a sticky summer afternoon.
I'm sure I've talked about it before but on the way to my great aunt's farm in Daggett, Michigan there are abandoned houses and entire farms scattered alongside the highway like true rubies and diamonds tossed inadvertently from a car, exposed to the elements, scratched by time's greedy finger, fogged by its potent breath until it is a ghost of its former self, a constantly thinning shell that houses nothing but the air which breathes in and out of its many openings. My aunt was explaining how each of these places came to be abandoned, and of course I was interested in every tale. I would give anything to learn the true stories behind the houses which I so fleetingly glimpse through the window of my car, but now that I think about it. Perhaps it's better not to know, for my imagination would become a mere vapor, lingering swirls of cigarette smoke hanging in a room stripped of everything, yet the past remaining, too deeply embedded to ever be torn away. For even as the blood drains the veins remain, as does the heart and the dry riverbed leading to the shrinking sea. There is always something that remains, even when there seems nothing is left for it to cling to.
A while back, in the early nineties I believe, there was a man who photographed a certain farmhouse somewhere in the countryside for a decade or so in each season. In the first photograph the farmhouse was occupied and the farm used regularly. In the second photo it had been abandoned, the photo had been taken some five years later I believe. Obvious changes had already occurred. The once uniform, sharp coat of white paint the house donned like the precisely ironed uniform a nurse would wear was now marred by strips of wood showing beneath. Time was peeling back the layers like an onion being peeled to the rotted core, or a child innocently licking a sucker, his tongue red with candy, oblivious to the sharp spike waiting to pierce it just below the bubbled surface. The out buildings had suffered the same fate, their metal roofs rusted and sagging. The third and final photo was taken in the fall, showing some trees cleared in an adjacent field, as well as the house's two-tiered porch slowly leaning away, like a mother turning away from her misbehaving child, shame etched into her face by a red cloak. Great bald patches of paintless siding snarled at the camera, out buildings bore roofs of red rust appearing to mimic the fall foliage in perhaps a last attempt at beauty, a cry for help.
It's sad really, to see a house fall to shambles like that, nevertheless an entire farm. For at one point, no matter if it a decade, a century or a mere three years ago that any place was abandoned, you know there was a hard-working family living there, earning a paycheck, cooking family meals, holding raucous bridge games on Sunday night. Now all of those things are distant memories, viewed through the telescope with the cracked lenses that's just short of bringing everything into focus. There was a house on the way to my aunt's farm that for the longest time was pretty much intact. If I remember correctly, it had been struck by lightning sometime ago. Well, prior to my most recent visit, I hadn't been out in quite some time and anxiously scanned the right side of the road, recalling the house sat at the bottom of a hill. I had remembered most of the roof being caved in and a pile of its own materials sitting in the middle of the four walls like shoveling dirt into your own grave, but upon seeing it on that particular trip I found out that not only did the four walls cave in, but also the roof. My heart had deflated instantly, perhaps mimicking the house's demise, trying to capture what it felt like for it to give that final sigh and feel its own weight fall against it, enclosing it like arms being folded over a hardened, cold body as its lowered into the ground. It had looked to be a beautiful bungalow-style home at one time, but is now a heaping pile of rubble, just like the neighbor's barn across from my aunt's farm.
The green-shingled roof sits atop broken-off and splintered siding and a remarkably newer looking concrete-block foundation. It's a shabby blanket perhaps, thrown over a starving street animal, a small gesture of comfort. Or it could be a moss-layered, floppy hat disguising a cancer-stricken scalp below, hiding its rawest truths from reality, from the prying eye. I remember when that barn was standing, the roof would repeatedly sag further and further inward while the outer opposite edges bulged outward until I thought it would explode at both ends, spewing grayed, wooden siding like a baseball greedily knocking teeth out of its way. But the roof simply proved too great a weight and it fell against the foundation like a flattened pancake smacking against the concrete, having slipped from the spatula. It was ruined, irrevocable. Thankfully my aunt's own barn, albeit not in use save for a friend of hers who carves wood in it, is still standing strong and humbly against the Midwestern sky. I find the barn fascinating for many reasons, but mostly because of the simple fact that it's a barn, and it's old.
Perhaps when I mentioned of time being the greatest thief you didn't automatically think of the effect it has on buildings but instead thought of how it affects your life. But that's for another blog post entirely, and ironically I find i can relate better to this one, than if I were to write the other. Maybe it's not ironic at all thought, for like I said, We all have different ways we view the world, and different things we gravitate to and let pull our attention.
I have seen many an abandoned barn in my lifetime, and fiercely wish I could photograph them all, but one thing I have yet to see are ghost towns. Now ghost towns hold their own fascination for me. For it isn't just one family and one lifestyle that has left the buildings they once lived in like a loon's cry dissipating into the morning's thick fog lacing the thin air, it's an entire community, perhaps hundreds of families full of bustling children, apron-donning wives and hard-working men that for a while enjoyed the luxury of that perpetually spinning Vegas wheel landing on the jackpot every time, the continuous whir of its arc was the clink of axes against stone, the chatter of children rising and falling, the crack of eggs, the giggles of gossip and desire, the soft whisper of gold and silver, the scrape of bills flying from finger to register...until that click became the fire of a shot gun, the ending of an era, the deflating of a dream raining down like shrapnel, piercing everything, running the veins dry, bleeding out the heart. Imagine a ghost town sitting in the middle of a valley, darkened, paint less buildings rising unsteadily and parched from the earth like scabs barely covering wounds which will never heal. Perhaps a few yellowed pages still flab in the post office, or a crooked screen door swings on its unoiled hinges, beckoning its old friend the wind to come and play, to push the rocking chair, to open the windows, to pluck a tune on the dusty piano keys. When was last call at the saloon? Is the wind pushing over cobweb-draped stool the ghost of a drunk still trying to reach home, formulating an excuse in his mind to feed the wife, apologizes laced with liquor and perhaps a hint of the inevitable ending of it all?
But for as much as time steels from such places, it is frozen within them as well. For perhaps as much as it continually takes, it cannot help but give back, to stay awhile. There was a poem I wrote earlier this year I believe that revolved around a fictional ghost town. I've chosen to end with that. If you've ever photographed an abandoned house, ghost town, or barn, or simply witnessed one huddled deep in the woods or the crook of a valley alongside a rural highway, I would love to hear your story. As you can tell, I could talk about such things all day! You, the readers of my blog, have that same right.
Another Ghost Town Lives On
by Corrina
Each building bears a
sagging facade. Darkened
by time, stripped by wind's
raspy breath stealing over
jagged teeth lining the hills.
Roof lines mimicking the
curve of the valley beyond.
Three letters vanished
from the sign once boasting
the word saloon. Drunks no more.
Yellowed squares of paper
scrape along the post office floor.
Screen doors bang open
pleading for one more delivery
of letters from men far from home.
Riches once flowed freely,
through dirt roads and calloused hands.
Gold was the word that birthed this town,
springing it from the very dirt that now
wears its skin thin, bringing death closer.
Titled stones fight for existence
amidst a labyrinth of weeds and
old beer cans. They are as worn as the town
which once sustained the people
buried below, forgotten by the world.
If they had known their beloved
town would one day be no more,
would they have so eagerly built
up homes and businesses?
Rushing an undiscovered frontier?
A faded wooden tractor sits upon
a sill, beside a headless teddy bear.
Pale sunlight weaving through cracks
in rotten clapboards the only thing
left reaching out to touch, to acknowledge.
Rutted roads cling to the feel
of wagon wheels digging in.
Leaning porches whisper of times
when the broken chairs would
patiently wait for a tired soul.
A one-room schoolhouse
dominates the only hill.
Tiny voices laughing gaily,
feet and books shuffling.
It is only the wind.
Is the wind the only living
thing amongst these sleeping
relics? The last to pick a tune
upon cracked piano keys, or
slip into a pew within the church?
Sunlight comes in early morning,
to dance beside the wind.
To fade another family picture and
steal moisture from house's bones.
They are like children playing amongst graves.
It is a town dying a slow death,
despite its lifeblood so swiftly torn
from its veins. The main road cuts
through like a splintered spine,
another ghost town lives on.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
The Places That We Do
I'm not sure how the question got to lodging itself in my mind, and then working its way forward through the myriad folders, file drawers, meandering hallways with their dim, flickering lights and pockmarked floors until it stumbled out into daylight, squinting up at the sky until I thought, hey, I could make a blog post out of this! But here I am nonetheless, writing the first blog post of July. It's crazy really how fast summer goes by. Its like winter is the beginning of a novel and the writer is fresh and the ideas tumble forth through pen or fingers like melting ice off of a mountainside becomes a crystalline lake that gives life to animals below. But fast forward to the end of the novel, with a looming deadline and the pressing knowledge that you have to catch those swaying loose ends and somehow tie them all into a big knot weighing in the back of your mind like too much snow piling on a log cabin's roof. This phase of writing is summer, all of the other seasons are crowding in, wanting their share. The writer feels rushed, their creative spirit snuffed out until they're simply writing anything, that zeal no longer there, the pure need to feel that knot tied the only fuel keeping the words flowing. Finally it's done and all is satisfied, and the cycle starts all over again with fall. Which is my favorite season by the way! But that's for another time.
What I had intended to talk about, and what I hinted at in the beginning of this post was a question that came to me sometime last week: how did we end up living in the places that we do? Maybe that seems trivial to you, and in some sense every question ever asked will seem completely trivial to millions of people, but if it matters to a handful, or even just one, isn't it worth asking? Think of where you live right now. Is it in the Great Plains, the Pacific Northwest? The Midwest, New England, the Deep South? All of these places have their own special culture and ways of life, but yet their all contained within the U.S. How did one person end up in Oklahoma and another in Maine? How do families and friends end up states apart from each other? What makes us move to certain places, what makes us visit one place and end up staying?
Perhaps to help answer these questions I can insert a bit of my own family history. Both of my parents were born in the U.P, known as those who aren't familiar with that as the Upper Peninsula, or in even other words, Upper Michigan. Somewhere in the mid 80's they both moved to Sheboygan, Wisconsin to work at Kohler Manufacturing, and they've been here ever since. Both my brother and I were born in Sheboygan and have grown up here. Work is a major factor in determining where we live, and so is college.
This Fall I'll transfer from Sheboygan's community college to UW-Green Bay where I'll major in English-Creative Writing. I'll be living in Green Bay for the next four years, and after that? Who knows? There are a million places I'd love to live. Don't we all have those places we dream about living someday. The key word there is someday isn't it? We can't really say "oh I'm going to live there within the next four to six years, because that seems too permanent and assured. So we insert someday but keep that 'someday' within reach, rather than just letting it float out there like the whisper of wheat fields upon still summer air.
But just as work and college guide us from one place to another, it may very well be the heart that keeps us there. While we inevitably all look back to where we came from, the heart I believe looks back far less and looks ahead more than anything. After graduating from UW-GB I just might decide to stay in Green Bay, rather than move back to Sheboygan. Obviously I have many ties there, but due in part to the writer within me, I feel a restless spirit stirring deep within, dreaming and plotting of far away places where the places I write about will be my own. This writer is far different from my own personality, which fears stepping beyond the threshold of home and entering a fantastical world of new beginnings and shimmering yellow brick roads twisting and dipping away in all directions. But, we must all leave home in order to continue the chapters of our lives and see the words flourish on the page like a fancy quill-tipped pen from long ago arching in thin, black strokes upon paper, making nary a mark of ink but forming beautiful, eloquent words, a silently singing poem playing sweetly in the head in which they tumble from.
So, I ask you then, what places do you dream to live? Just as the writer within me contrasts blatantly with my own personality, so do my aspirations and passions. For instance, for as long as I have held a fascination with tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, so have I longed to live in Oklahoma. My brother pokes fun at me because I have no better explanation for why I chose Oklahoma out of all of the other Great Plains states to live in than what I listed above. I've also used Oklahoma as the setting for many of my stories and am just now branching out to other states. Now I understand that Oklahoma is as flat as a feverishly ironed and starched dress shirt, but that sort of insipid landscape suits me just fine. As for the storms, I honestly don't know how I would react to seeing a tornado for the first time, but I can tell you this it is on my bucket list to see a tornado in my lifetime, and perhaps even chase them professionally. Perhaps you think I'm getting ahead of myself but seriously, I'll dabbled in my mind with having a side job as a professional photographer, and I would love nothing more than to be standing in the middle of a dirt road with trees and grass flattened to the ground, wind screaming in my ears and a mile-wide black mouthed tornado barreling towards me. Just think about it! Tornadoes are nature at some of its most sinister and powerful. To witness that power first hand would be incredible.
Of course, such a zest for severe weather could be due to the fact that living in Sheboygan, which is close to Lake Michigan, we don't see severe thunderstorms, or let alone a real thunderstorm all that often. I like to joke to people that I am deprived of a true thunderstorm, not I wish such severity to befall my hometown, but come on! At least a little danger couldn't hurt right?
Another place I would love to live is New England, specifically Salem, Mass. Why Salem you ask? Because Salem has the highest concentration of 17th century homes. Yes, I know, I'm turning out to be a real shocker aren't I? For the readers out there who know my passions, you'll realize the sarcasm there. I love severe weather and I also love old houses. Now what's wrong with an old house in Oklahoma you may be wondering? And the truth is, nothing. But with New England, the number of old houses increases greatly. To be surrounded by that much history every day would be - excuse the cliche here - a dream come true. The oldest house in America, and I'll be damned if I remember where it is, was built c. 1631. It's actually just one room inside a mansion built a century later. Could you imagine living amongst that kind of history?
I'll reveal another one of my dreams, I've always been captivated by dilapidated old houses. You know the type: paint-peeled wooden siding, foggy window panes like cataracts, sagging roof, sagging porch and inside a whole lot more sagging and peeling like skin slowly separating from aged bones. These houses cry out for help, because although the body fails, the heart still beats strongly within. One of my favorite magazines, This Old House, has a section in the back called Save This Old House and each issue it features an old house in danger of being razed or demolished lest someone come to its rescue. My heart breaks for each of these houses, for a long time ago someone built them with pride for their family, bride or anyone else and paid meticulous attention to detail and construction. Now they're left to fall apart and succumb to the cruel, constantly prodding hands of time like the curious finger of a child poking a purplish bruise despite the cries of the other person. I wish I could fix all of the houses featured in the magazine, and that dream is a someday I intend to make come true in the future. While my mom rattles off all of the advantages of a newly built - or newer built - home I'm yearning for the uneven floorboards, the crumbling plaster, the drafty windows and everything else that lives an old house its beloved character I find so captivating within my many stories.
Well, I should've known better than to start talking about old houses. Look how long I've rambled on about them! But then again, just my writing, they are such a huge part of me, and even know as I attempt to move on from the subject I find images of old houses both from reality and my imagination flickering in my mind like stills of an old picture show reflecting splotched and yellowed against my gaze.
Such as the heart can guide and anchor us to a certain location, so can love. I'll give the example of my cousin, Katie, and her fiancee. Katie is originally from the U.P just like my parents, but roughly two years ago I think she moved down to Lower Michigan because that was where her fiancee was from, and she's been down there since. So whether it's love, our hearts, dreams, college choices, work changes or job transfers that land us in the places we live, there's no doub that we dream beyond the county lines that are drawn around us, like a child daring to color outside the lines, a wild grin upon his face.
What I had intended to talk about, and what I hinted at in the beginning of this post was a question that came to me sometime last week: how did we end up living in the places that we do? Maybe that seems trivial to you, and in some sense every question ever asked will seem completely trivial to millions of people, but if it matters to a handful, or even just one, isn't it worth asking? Think of where you live right now. Is it in the Great Plains, the Pacific Northwest? The Midwest, New England, the Deep South? All of these places have their own special culture and ways of life, but yet their all contained within the U.S. How did one person end up in Oklahoma and another in Maine? How do families and friends end up states apart from each other? What makes us move to certain places, what makes us visit one place and end up staying?
Perhaps to help answer these questions I can insert a bit of my own family history. Both of my parents were born in the U.P, known as those who aren't familiar with that as the Upper Peninsula, or in even other words, Upper Michigan. Somewhere in the mid 80's they both moved to Sheboygan, Wisconsin to work at Kohler Manufacturing, and they've been here ever since. Both my brother and I were born in Sheboygan and have grown up here. Work is a major factor in determining where we live, and so is college.
This Fall I'll transfer from Sheboygan's community college to UW-Green Bay where I'll major in English-Creative Writing. I'll be living in Green Bay for the next four years, and after that? Who knows? There are a million places I'd love to live. Don't we all have those places we dream about living someday. The key word there is someday isn't it? We can't really say "oh I'm going to live there within the next four to six years, because that seems too permanent and assured. So we insert someday but keep that 'someday' within reach, rather than just letting it float out there like the whisper of wheat fields upon still summer air.
But just as work and college guide us from one place to another, it may very well be the heart that keeps us there. While we inevitably all look back to where we came from, the heart I believe looks back far less and looks ahead more than anything. After graduating from UW-GB I just might decide to stay in Green Bay, rather than move back to Sheboygan. Obviously I have many ties there, but due in part to the writer within me, I feel a restless spirit stirring deep within, dreaming and plotting of far away places where the places I write about will be my own. This writer is far different from my own personality, which fears stepping beyond the threshold of home and entering a fantastical world of new beginnings and shimmering yellow brick roads twisting and dipping away in all directions. But, we must all leave home in order to continue the chapters of our lives and see the words flourish on the page like a fancy quill-tipped pen from long ago arching in thin, black strokes upon paper, making nary a mark of ink but forming beautiful, eloquent words, a silently singing poem playing sweetly in the head in which they tumble from.
So, I ask you then, what places do you dream to live? Just as the writer within me contrasts blatantly with my own personality, so do my aspirations and passions. For instance, for as long as I have held a fascination with tornadoes and severe thunderstorms, so have I longed to live in Oklahoma. My brother pokes fun at me because I have no better explanation for why I chose Oklahoma out of all of the other Great Plains states to live in than what I listed above. I've also used Oklahoma as the setting for many of my stories and am just now branching out to other states. Now I understand that Oklahoma is as flat as a feverishly ironed and starched dress shirt, but that sort of insipid landscape suits me just fine. As for the storms, I honestly don't know how I would react to seeing a tornado for the first time, but I can tell you this it is on my bucket list to see a tornado in my lifetime, and perhaps even chase them professionally. Perhaps you think I'm getting ahead of myself but seriously, I'll dabbled in my mind with having a side job as a professional photographer, and I would love nothing more than to be standing in the middle of a dirt road with trees and grass flattened to the ground, wind screaming in my ears and a mile-wide black mouthed tornado barreling towards me. Just think about it! Tornadoes are nature at some of its most sinister and powerful. To witness that power first hand would be incredible.
Of course, such a zest for severe weather could be due to the fact that living in Sheboygan, which is close to Lake Michigan, we don't see severe thunderstorms, or let alone a real thunderstorm all that often. I like to joke to people that I am deprived of a true thunderstorm, not I wish such severity to befall my hometown, but come on! At least a little danger couldn't hurt right?
Another place I would love to live is New England, specifically Salem, Mass. Why Salem you ask? Because Salem has the highest concentration of 17th century homes. Yes, I know, I'm turning out to be a real shocker aren't I? For the readers out there who know my passions, you'll realize the sarcasm there. I love severe weather and I also love old houses. Now what's wrong with an old house in Oklahoma you may be wondering? And the truth is, nothing. But with New England, the number of old houses increases greatly. To be surrounded by that much history every day would be - excuse the cliche here - a dream come true. The oldest house in America, and I'll be damned if I remember where it is, was built c. 1631. It's actually just one room inside a mansion built a century later. Could you imagine living amongst that kind of history?
I'll reveal another one of my dreams, I've always been captivated by dilapidated old houses. You know the type: paint-peeled wooden siding, foggy window panes like cataracts, sagging roof, sagging porch and inside a whole lot more sagging and peeling like skin slowly separating from aged bones. These houses cry out for help, because although the body fails, the heart still beats strongly within. One of my favorite magazines, This Old House, has a section in the back called Save This Old House and each issue it features an old house in danger of being razed or demolished lest someone come to its rescue. My heart breaks for each of these houses, for a long time ago someone built them with pride for their family, bride or anyone else and paid meticulous attention to detail and construction. Now they're left to fall apart and succumb to the cruel, constantly prodding hands of time like the curious finger of a child poking a purplish bruise despite the cries of the other person. I wish I could fix all of the houses featured in the magazine, and that dream is a someday I intend to make come true in the future. While my mom rattles off all of the advantages of a newly built - or newer built - home I'm yearning for the uneven floorboards, the crumbling plaster, the drafty windows and everything else that lives an old house its beloved character I find so captivating within my many stories.
Well, I should've known better than to start talking about old houses. Look how long I've rambled on about them! But then again, just my writing, they are such a huge part of me, and even know as I attempt to move on from the subject I find images of old houses both from reality and my imagination flickering in my mind like stills of an old picture show reflecting splotched and yellowed against my gaze.
Such as the heart can guide and anchor us to a certain location, so can love. I'll give the example of my cousin, Katie, and her fiancee. Katie is originally from the U.P just like my parents, but roughly two years ago I think she moved down to Lower Michigan because that was where her fiancee was from, and she's been down there since. So whether it's love, our hearts, dreams, college choices, work changes or job transfers that land us in the places we live, there's no doub that we dream beyond the county lines that are drawn around us, like a child daring to color outside the lines, a wild grin upon his face.
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