Newscoma

The sky in Hoots these last couple of days has been so blue and wide-open that I found myself catching my breath from its beauty. These are fragments of sight and sound when I meander around the towns of this area, small wicked things that I see that make me wonder how I miss them on occasion. A train whistle, the creak in my brakes that must be fixed immediately, the voice of my friend Christopher Robin (as I’ve called him for nearly 20 years) telling me the news and the weather on the local radio station. Pieces of sound and light, of movement and the still life version of deer standing at the edge of multiple fields that I saw repeatedly these last two days. They only move when they are startled and in the distance you see that the fast pace of the cars are normal to them as long as the mechanical beasts stay on the horizon.

The deer stand lazily near the treeline, eating what is left and not ruined.

It’s getting colder finally and some crops still wait, wet and listless, in the fields. The moon did not disappoint us last night, and I dared not take it’s picture. I’ve never been able to capture the moon on film, and I assume it does not want to be caught. It’s etched in memory only and that is enough.

I feel a bit disconnected this week. I don’t know what I’m looking for as I ramble these roads, four-lanes that make us accessible, not nearly enough to bring the plants we need for jobs to save our census next year. Combines labor in soybean fields waiting for the harvest, which has been too wet to move forward on machines that cost as much as three houses here and that are used so briefly to accomplish the year’s end of bean, of cotton and remnants of last minute corn.

One man told me he had the flu. As he drives a truck, he sweated what he could of his illness out on his drive from Wisconsin to Florida before heading back home to Tennessee. “I had to deliver,” he said. “I can’t afford to get sick right now.” I asked about Mr. Jimmy, and no one has seen him. I will inquire again today about his whereabouts however I’m not going to the places that he frequents right now as much as I did. It worries me when I don’t see him for awhile. He’s older and not very ambulatory. He can’t know that I’m looking after him from a distance, as that would anger him, so I will stand in the shadows and ask those that know more than I do if he’s okay. The changing of the season can be wretched for some, and I think this applies to Mr. Jimmy.

Fragments of a life in a community, where there is a connection and, then at times, there isn’t. Everything is local, except we must remember, that local is where you are at in that very moment.

I remind myself this everyday. Seeing what is right before my eyes and not anticipating what I will see in the very next minute. It’s hard work, my friends.