Just allow me this moment to say that I LOVE THESE PICTURES THAT I TOOK and also a warning to prep yourself for another rather sad people/places analogy/rant. #sorrynotsorry
our lane. as in, yours and mine.
open and honest, the towering brown rabbit of a house nested against a row of ponderosas,
three of them a three-headed dog.
if you follow where the driveway points, an arm into the wilderness
you end up in the stream-bottom, hidden heart of the wood,
wandering water trickling down from a lake 30 miles away, 30 years up the canyon.
you end up in an aspen grove with a random pond
in the middle where we don’t ice skate in the winter
because we don’t know if it freezes and none of us are brave enough to find out.
none of us want to be eaten by water.
you have to walk down a hill to get there.
it’s the same hill we go sledding on in winter, dangerous,
like an angry boyfriend, but alluring in the same way.
you have to take a
6-foot sidestep to avoid the sister of a bush with inch-long thorns.
around
all this are the fatherly fields, that take away the view of the highway and
when you lean
down it looks like the grass stems have been dipped in
gold-making water,
except the water is the sky and it's blue as eyes, blue as ice.
and even beyond that are the step-mother mountains, protective, leaning in to
eavesdrop your secrets,
passing them on to the wild animals that snicker in the
night.
the mountains where
snow shows up in september
and doesn’t leave until june
the
very heart of them is ice and
you know
that if you started walking through them,
if you tried to leave, you’d never
reach the other side.
and if
you look at where the mountains start and
follow the pointed ears and the
pointed hair
up up up up and over
until you reach the pointed ears
and pointed hair
on the other side with a playpen for the sun and moon and
stars in between,
where geese dip their wings in the spring and fall
clouds parade and wander and fight
you swear that if you look hard enough
the blue of the sky turns into the blue of the sea
the whispers of the wind
gossips that live in the trees turn into
lullabies of sea goddesses and gold grass
turns to gold sand
but either way you know that if you started walking through
the mountains or you started flying
through the sky or the sea
either way you know that
you won’t make it out the other side.
and you
know that if you did, if you did start walking or flying, and you changed your mind
half-way, and you started
walking back,
the damage would be done.
your stepmother would be broken and
old, and your father wouldn’t be gold grass covered anymore,
he would be simply
dirt and the few remnants of brown field,
and the sister thorn bush would be
gone and the boyfriend would be married to the stream
and let’s face it: if you
leave now it will never be the same.
