The thing I noticed first upon settling here in the city was the lack of a clear sunset.
Living in the city you really don't notice the skyline. It's hard to believe I've lived here almost six years now, time framing those days with a memory more focused than the days themselves. It's noise, and tall buildings and people rushing about like worker ants, there in those evenings conjured by the time and tide of recollection.
I remember well the days of wide stretches of open land, remembering long drives across the desert on the way to visit my Dad's brother at his ranch. We had no air conditioning and on one such trip, I'd stealthily stowed my turtles along in their little turtle habitat into the trunk, not wanting to leave them for the lady that fed the dog and watered the plants. Halfway across the flats, my Dad went to get something out of the trunk. Turtle soup. I honestly don't remember the incident itself, hearing the story in family tales, but Dad said there was nothing more heartrending for him to watch the heat shimmer off the ground while his little girl cried her eyes out for something, that in its saving, she destroyed.
But later trips were fun. One Spring break instead of hitting the beaches, I bought a Greyhound Ameripass and rode all the way from Seattle to Maine and back, stopping every couple of days for sleep and showers in a cheap hotel, seeing a slice of Americana that included the Tall Corn Motel, thunderstorms gathering over the Black Hills, and horizons as broad as our future was.
But then I grew up, graduated, moving to a large urban area and the sunsets came and went without notice. I'd be working and the sun would be there, and the next thing you knew it was just dark as if God somehow had a clapper and with a movement of mighty hands decided it was bedtime. Perhaps they were there, and I just did not notice, caught up in life, noise and the narcissistic self-preservation of youth.
But when a midlife change in careers brought me to the midwest, I'd forgotten how FLAT it was. I could say, as the poets did, that the land "gently rolled" but that would be implying way too movement on the earth's part. Other than the occasional wooded downslope into some low creek and river land, it was flat. Plain and simple. It was so different than the tall peaks in the land where I grew up. When I moved to the midwest I would drove for miles without seeing a Starbucks, and out of habit, I'd check the side of the roadway for elk, an action that even after years of less sky and more concrete, was still second nature for me. But there, the only large animals were in the corn, a multitude of unseen deer hiding like silent nuns from human contact and not likely to stray out in the roadway during the daylight hours. Everywhere I looked were the remnants of corn, sentient rows of former proud stalks, that stood fading in the early winter air, dead to silent hints of abundant summer past. Summers of green and hard work and plenty.
I noticed it hunting, I noticed it up on the vast farmland that belonged to a friend. I noticed it even more so on the yearly drive back to Colorado to visit Brigid Jr. The last time I went, I made the drive in two days, stopping only for barbecue outside of Kansas City and gas. The scenery's changes were so very small as I went west, that many would not notice, wrapped up in conversation or music. County after county of silos and sunflowers that fluttered like flags on the breeze until it begins, that slow dance of the sun into the Western sky. It became a ritual, that daily birth and little death of the sun, rising and ceasing like wind or fire. I simply watched, as lengthened shadows crept across the cab, laying themselves like a hand on my thigh, as the sun disappeared in shuddering breath.
As I drove across Kansas, I thought. Why is this land so different from where I grew up? Certainly I can put on the scientist hat and say it was the glaciers that moved down from the north in the Cnozoac era, or the giant dust storms that followed that carried the soil away, then replaced by layers of volcanic ash from the West, creating a vista of fertility. But the difference is more how I live in it, as opposed to its geological origins.
There is something about being able to see so near and so far. Some people feel exposed out in the open land, I never did. I would walk the fields, gun in hand, nothing more than a moving lightning rod for those things that might wish to strike me, but they don't. I felt a lot out there in the open heartland, my hunting dog by my side, and it was not fear, it's comfort. It followed me as I walked, the sound of my breath, the whisper of God there in the corn, the vista of open miles of ground in which I perceived the absolute truth about the past, a truth beyond the buildings and billboards of illusion.
When I went home for my stepmom's funeral 10 years ago, my family again asked why I didn't move back west. I didn't have a husband or young children to hold me in place, they said. I wasn't quite sure what to say. I didn't have any promise to this place. But I liked it here in the Midwest, my heart was here, the miles of corn, the open prairie grasses to the West, the Great Lakes where the loon sings its song to its beloved. I'll not retire to the land that's become "new California". When I retire I'll get a little cabin out on some open land, if only for the weekends.
It will be my own little patch of earth, flat and rich with grass from the fertile soil with a view looking west. Just to the north, past the woods and the stream, will be cornfields, geometric and furrowed, planted in the Spring when the first dove calls to her lover. The land will spread out flat and pure as freshly spilled milk, clear out to where the sun is settling down for the night.
They say the Rockies are God's country but so will be that little place in my future, a small juncture of tree and grass and perhaps a simple lawn chair. A small point in space among a great expanse of glory, where the Trinity is intact because it had never been otherwise, simply tested by the fragility of youth and the passion of yearning. God lost and then found, postulated there in the open miles of our faith and need.
The afternoon breeze blows in from Lake Michigan, curtains gently moving inward and out, as if by the breath of summer itself. The grill is warmed up, the dog guarding against squirrels intent on stealing a Bratwurst. No, I don't think I'll move back west, content to stay where I put down roots. Especially on days like today, in which I have no demands on my time, other than to just sit and watch the sun go down while Partner in Grime stands watch over the grill. At the edge of the woods, the large nature preserve to which the neighborhood backs up, there are deer, silent and secretive, watching from the growing darkness. I point my finger at an unseen buck. Bang.
With a look to see how much light is left to organize dinner and a sip of lemonade, I take in memory of my last hunt from a blind. It was a day of bracing cold and little activity, the sky spitting snow, the deer hunkered down for warmth as I should have been.
At noon I came on down for a mashed peanut butter sandwich and a nature break. Then I went back up. The afternoon sky began to clear, sun glinting off the large cornfield that bisected the stands of trees where marks indicated that the deer had their own superhighway.
The deer weren't moving that day, too much wind, too much blowing snow, they'd likely stay down until morning. As I would soon. But I had no great desire to leave the stand just yet, captivated by the sunset that could be seen for miles.
There, in the western sky, it began. What struck me were the colors. How do you describe such color? First a gathering blue-grey like the whole of a Confederate army taking over that space between light and dark, leaving streaks of red upon the ground, blood leaching into the earth. That royal blue-red, that in centuries past would have been forbidden to be worn by the masses, on the threat of death. Then the sun lights up the horizon in one last encore before leaving, oranges and yellows, dripping like forgotten fruit into the horizon, their taste, and texture, fragrant and lush against the plate of the earth. Then, finally, darkness that hints of languid dreams as it pulls itself up over the form of the earth to cover it and keep it warm.
And so I sat, under sunless, moonless cover, my gun in my lap, the night a blanket over me. So dark. So quiet. I was left to trace in the early night with my eyes closed, all those variated colors that I held for an instant, all the colors that I cataloged in memory, alone in the darkness, the lost hues, and shades, sitting up in a tree watching the land as the eyes of day went dim.
Tonight I'm just in a lawn chair out in the driveway, but the colors are much the same albeit hidden a bit from view by the shapes and forms of the city. For on yet another night, the sun makes it's scheduled and solitary goodbye. But if I keep my eyes closed, closed real tight, I can still see the sun, bursting across the back of my eyelids, in the frames of memory of other warm evenings. Color splashing across the blackness set loose in a sudden spray, a thought of those long ago days of open horizons in the back of my mind. A thought that feels as ticklish as electricity before the blackout. Thought of the color and the warmth of those fine days of open land and tilled earth, a sudden flash of light in this dark world. So I keep my eyes closed as long as I can, to hold the picture in. I've got the last light of thought in my soul, stored in a photograph engraved on my eyes, and it will keep me until the sight of another dwindled night brings the memory back to me.
