Tag: country
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Seeing the Signs
Observing signs in the modern age. In the city… There’s a man standing facing the flow of foot traffic when I get to the train station. I notice an easel stand with a sign clipped from fasteners on the top edge. The thick black words on the sign ask of the passersby, “Do you know…
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Lights on the Farmhouse Table
Retrospect would have had me listen a whole lot closer when Dale Parish first told me about the lights. You know what they say about hindsight. Dale lived his whole life on his family’s farm. Ever since grade school, he’d start first period having already been up at least four hours. The rest of us…
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Knee-high by the Fourth of July
On the opposite side of the road passed the third pickup he’d seen that afternoon donning an oversized American flag waving in the blackened air behind the cab’s smokestack exhaust pipes. Patriotism, he thought as stomach acid warmed his chest, muddied and misled. The giant flag, strung from a 4’’X4’’ wooden post, flapped in animated…
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Spoon Licks
Bits of ground coffee lodged themselves in between what teeth were still sticking in his beet-red gums. The tip of a rollie hung gently from the top of his lip while he humbled, that is hummed and mumbled, some conjured-up words to nestle between the clankity clanking tings he made while the spoons hit themselves,…
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Willow Creek
I remember when Stacy and I would go down to Willow Creek to skip rocks. I’d get mine all the way across; hers would only travel about half the way before descending out of view. “No one’ll ever try to skip that one again,” I’d say as the stone tucked itself in to the muddy…
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Doe Re Meandering
It’s still not clear to me exactly what I was doing driving around that night and when it comes down to hard facts, I could care less. I spent a number of purposeless hours behind the wheel during those months. Maybe it was the result of a living in a small town past my prime…
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The Goddess Who Lives on the Dirt Road off Route 12
Every morning, on my drive to school, I see her waiting for the yellow bus to come and haul her off to St. Paul’s School for Girls. She wears a red and blue plaid skirt and a navy blue sweater vest because that’s what all the girls have to wear at that place. I drive…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 