Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
1. Spring
Spring is here, or spring is still a long ways off. It depends on when you’re reading this.
But as someone who grew up in a constant rain (just 39 degrees, and the wind lashing it sideways sometimes)… as someone who didn’t see the sun most days until it drifted down below the overcast (bright out west, a reminder, before it quickly set)… to me, the spring is a pretty good season, with flowers bringing back color from wherever it’s been. I’m saying I like it, I guess.
Spring: It’s both totally normal and hard to believe. Look up, look out the window, and now listen—are there crows calling back and forth? I don’t know what the details are; that’s up to spring and you:
Art Is Such a Good Journey
Kari’s grandmother used to tell us, “Put some scribbles there—a million begonias. And now it’s spring again, blooming. Yes.”
Not scuba, not yoga, not for her, but she could make you young-eyed when teaching you to paint.
“Orange pinwheels, try it. That’s sunlight, that’s Mama Eggs.”
And my favorite, what I’ll never forget: “Don’t ever put your vision on like shoes, my darlings. We’re traveling, not making doormats.”
2. Maps
The best maps they had in school, I thought, were the ones that showed the topography. That way, you knew where the mountains were, where to go and stand if you wanted to look at the world for as far as your eyes could see. How many animals were out there? And not just cows; I mean moose, wolves, maybe grizzlies, probably crows by the thousands on the branches of cedars, and all of them calling out, Craaawk, that there’s a mountain lion coming. And the rivers weren’t just lines someone drew but these real things with wideness or rapids. And the air smelled like air, and the clouds sat lower in the sky.
Now I’m not sure they’re ever even looked at, maps. Our kid, for instance (he’s 15) just navigates by phone, by the little blinking icon and arrow destination, and sometimes a bot-voice will interrupt, blurting out, “In a hundred feet, turn right.”
Jameson’s bot speaks with an Indian accent. I guess you can choose: pick Irish if you want to, or New Jersey, or pissed off ROTC drill instructor. But I ask my kid to shut his phone off and just let me drive since I know where I’m going. In Salt Lake, it’s pretty hard not to. The city is laid out and numbered on a grid. Take Dee’s, this good place for breakfast. It’s on the corner of 700 East and 2100 South—
“East what?”
“East of the Temple.”
“South what?”
“South of the Temple.”
“Yeah, but I mean what street name?”
“They don’t have names.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Yes, it does. It’s as easy as playing Battleship.”
Anyway, maps (and globes too)—this century shouldn’t get rid of them. They aren’t just there to cover wall space. And no robot, not even a talking one, could ever fill the gaps.
You Are Here → •
I will never, despite the spinning, fly off the Earth. It’s just not possible. The grip that holds it all together—all the oceans and coffee cups, wheat fields and butter knives, porches and the cats on them, cats who’ve seen it all before; all the mornings turning birds into music, and streams turning stones into music, and women turning me into music when they smile, when they tell stories; all the sunlight and shadows, and moonlight and shadows; all the many moods of rain, and so much more—those hands keeping things together hold me here, despite the unlikelihood. Despite odds of infinity to one, they’re a surefire bet. Big hands. Galactic.
Hands building winds in the wind shop, then sawing some down into breezes. For every thermal updraft, fashioning a hawk. Hands shaping mice in the mouse shop for food, and seeds and cones in the wood shop for food, with enough left over for forests and orchards and maples for the pancakes of the world. Or arranging flowers in the flower shop, inventing the smell of cinnamon, creating the flavor of peaches, the purring in cats… none of it necessary, no explanation or meaning.
Which means they’re an artist’s hands, means you and I are paintings, means daylight and darkness are our frame, and we will never, even with the spinning, fly off the Earth while we’re alive. That’s a fact.
But some facts are magic: Like our minds. Like sex. Like every evening the sun sets. Like grapes are for much more than vitamins. Like a cat’s tail, up and casually flicking, is telling us the cat feels at home.
Rob Carney’s first collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens, is out now from Stormbird Press, and his new book of poems, Call and Response, is available from Black Lawrence Press. Previous books include Facts and Figures, The Last Tiger is Somewhere, The Book of Sharks, and 88 Maps.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo by 钧 张, courtesy Pixabay.
