Little soul little stray
little drifter
now where will you stay
all pale and all alone
after the way
you used to make fun of things
~Hadrian, ‘Little Soul’, translated by W. S. Merwin
photo: a handmade garden, in new light, from 2005.
…but, every photo has an also story…
the old sidewalk had been removed by a 10 and 11 year old pair of boys that were paid hourly, sledge hammers and shovels were – for them – a contest, a challenge to each other and the 100ºF summer sun, and one that paid well. Blisters and grit, took them a week or so, every day, ending up with a massive pile of the shattered chunks and shards sitting near the road where they were asked to put them, all sizes and shapes none of which was bigger than the strength of the kid it took to pick it up and put it there.
there had also been 2 busted and side-splitting antiques of mobile homes, a thicket of scrub near a rotting old grain silo, and a small wood shed in one corner, the nicest and most structurally sound of anything then present, all of it in a sea of towering grasses with rolling ankle-breaker yard hidden beneath. but by June it had all been completely cleared to the grasses, hauled away, now mowed like a baseball diamond and full of the same potential, with a very large and decidedly single oak in full summer foliage sitting just about perfectly in the middle, as if having arisen out of the depths. it never crossed my mind once to remove it.
only one project remained: laying out and then fitting the rocks in a huge oval pattern about the size of my pickup, the sharpest angles on each chunk sparkled glass-like by a noon sun, then 3 or 4 trips with the bucket loader dumping topsoil into the middle, the top of the irregular wall a hip-high hillbilly Hadrian, right out there next to the road. finally, and the point of the whole exercise when I think about it now, in went several cans from the feed store that just said ‘wildflowers’ on the side.
within weeks, a profusion of flowers pouring from the top, poking from every crevice along the sides, then the steady stream of people driving past that would slow down, even park their car beside the road and get out, and take a picture. a couple asked questions, “why the clearing?”, “is a Dollar General going in?”, and the historians with “my great-grandpa farmed this land” stories came by, everything said summarized in parting as, ‘well, it’s nothing like it was, it’s beautiful!’
Some beat up, used up, walked on and forgotten, now broken and useless hunk of waste, made into something all new and completely unexpected, something as different as it could possibly be from how it was and how everyone had long ago accepted that it would always be.