The Woods for the Trees

11 June 2022

Recognition scenes are slower now. I know her face, her white hair, her smile. We walk, together with Lilith, until the dog and I reach home. Then I remember her as the woman who understands the world as it's explained to her by an 18^th century French count. She says she didn’t know people fed dogs until she left the family farm for college. “People feed dogs!” she’d reported. Theirs took care of themselves.

Bumpersticker on a new neighbor’s truck: something about the 2^nd amendment. A large, new American flag hangs outside her small green cottage this morning. The more you connect the dots, the less anyone will believe them, because they are dots and not crosses or planets or soccer balls. The movie actor who spoke out against guns uses them in movies. Democrats read off a teleprompter. They refuse to talk about inflation, gas prices, crime. Such hypocrisy!

Inside the old house I found a calendar from 2016 with weeks in July marked “36^th, 37^th, 38^th.” Two stuffed animals hang on one wall, an orange “I Love Daddy” book lies on the floor beside plastic water bottles, an artificial lei, and other stuff. On the next wall, family photos: husband and wife and baby; two young children. An envelope that reads “memories,” must have a child’s elementary school photos tucked inside. Framed photograph, knocked over, of a baby. Elementary school class photo. One plastic page of an album full of old sporty cars. A Phillies towel and a uniform that hangs outside the closet. “Eat the Rainbow,” a bag announces. The refrigerator was toxic. On a counter beside it, two dvds of hot jailhouse babes. Instagram censors me when I post my photo of them.

A famous actor lives across the street, the gray-haired woman wearing a “Why Be Normal” teeshirt tells us. This used to be a beautiful farm. Someone got sick, and then someone else took advantage. Our rain forest Pompeii grows cobwebs and dead cars. One senses there are layers to this story, but it's flattened. We wander inside the end of one plot whose beginning and middle we don’t know. Nor can we know what happened next. “Usually, people take their family photos.” “So utterly sad,” a friend responds.

Half the residents are seekers, the other half (it sometimes seems) are violent. White men trying to survive themselves. But there are still people to be angry at, those who get TROs out on them. The man who raped an old woman. The man who was thrown out of town, twice. The man who was attacked twice, though in once instance he attacked first. We weren't supposed to know about that one. Watch out for him; he patrols this street, our why-be-normal friend tells us. When they ask what I’m doing, I usually tell them it’s for a photography class.

The Russian army is being starved, just as the developing world will be starved by Putin for lack of grain from Ukraine. Hunger wars. Putin says he’s Peter the Great, come back to claim the empire. (Parse fiction from non-fiction in that sentence.) The woman I’d already met told me Putin’s mother believed him to be the saint of Kyiv. No story sounds far-fetched, or they all are. So linger, please, at “I love daddy.”