Snow

I am looking over a sparking wonderland that is a blanket of stark whiteness covering the landscape. Unexpected – but beautiful nonetheless. And silent. Oddly the silence is comforting – like a gentle reassurance that all is right with the world and all the mistakes and meltdowns of the week are magically erased.

After weeks of searching for inspiration and purpose, I am surrounded and want to do nothing but pour out the words that have been packed in my brain trying to escape. The crazy dreams, memories from childhood, whisperings from Mom – a jumbled web of tangled themes that have been trying to escape lay on the edge of my consciousness ready to burst forth. The challenge is to corral them and ease them through the gate coherently. I know where to go to make this happen but being there right now isn’t an option – so it is a place I visit in my mind and imagination. I can see it – feel its pull on me – even transport myself there in my mind. I just can’t physically get there.

Archer City had a profound effect on me. It changed me. I was warned that would happen, but never believed it. I found something there I have never been able to reach and though I may have been able to create it in my subconscious, I didn’t know it existed.

The Archer City cemetery was for me what I imagine the lonely stark cabin in the woods is for writers who wish escape to coveted isolation to gather their thoughts and reign in their procrastination. Or where Duane found peace away from the madness of the big house when he started walking. I discovered this place long before I discovered Duane, but it is his landscape I wish so much to return to.

Even surrounded by cold and snow, it is the blistering heat that burns my lungs with every breath, the silent headstones that scream the existence of someone long forgotten to the jackrabbits that linger along the outlines of sunken earth and the fiery-eyed coyotes that scan terrain in the darkness that fill my senses and call me back.