dirt
This morning Matt woke me up early with his thousand alarms. I fell asleep downstairs and he put me to bed in my clothes, even though his new room is upstairs and frightfully hot. I drove him to work and then went back to my own bed. Had the most awful nightmare and woke up in a sweat.
After I woke up, Matt called me and asked if I wanted to go to a late dinner with him and Kelly. Matt is waking up early tomorrow (today, really) to drive Kelly to get her wisdom teeth out, and she was taking him to dinner to thank him. I had to explain about the nightmare on the phone. At dinner, my hands shook.
In between, though, I took a pretty good shower and went for another drive to Farmer City, west of Champaign on US-150. I guess it helped, a little. Not as much as I'm used to.
Last week I went out of boredom, I think, or maybe it was another bad day in politics (last time I cried about Dr. Tiller: Friday). It had been raining all day and was still foggy out. I'd never noticed before how all the buildings out there are white, all of them. All of them seem to have the same pitch to their roofs, too, which are all forest green, gray, or white.
US-136 has a junction with US-150 possessive of both a four-way stop and a flashing red light, which last week winked at me slowly pinkly, a benevolent aureole or a red beacon in a sea of milk. Today, sitting in a white sky with good visibility, it was only an intermittently lit red point on a line.
Lots of other things were the same, though. There isn't actually a lot of corn grown out here-- it's mostly soybeans-- but the summer has grown advanced enough, and recently it's rained enough, that the corn is finally distinguishable from the other crops in color and kind. It's hedged in by grass that's roughly its own height, though not for long.
The soy fields are better. In some places, they taper smoothly into perfect expansive and English lawns tended by riding mowers. In others, they foam suddenly into wildflowers and prairie grasses, a greener analogue to the crest of gravel that follows the shoulder of the road, and making me wonder about the meaning of a "frontier" in these places.
This area is divided, then molded, by bodies of water such as the Sangamon River and Salt Creek. On lots that border these, the soybeans hug the shape of the river and the edges of the stands of trees like a rock garden flooded green, premature to human nourishment.
On days such as these, the landscape of central Illinois reminds me a lot of rooms like Matt's and mine, with their wooden floors and high windows with their molding painted white. With its never-tended ivy obscuring the windows, and blue curtains between me and the leaves, my room is a variation on this type: as much like a leafy tent as a box of light whose character is quiet. Matt's room, barely lived in yet, is a better example, and the white houses along US-136 have the kind of narrow windows that move me to fantasize about the rooms inside.
It's comforting to know that such unabashedly physical realities (if more so than things like food or sex or comfort) can exert a pull on me, exact a toll. I've been spending a lot of time alone lately, in my hot little house, reading After Many A Summer Dies the Swan and wondering when next I'll love more than one person with the decency to stay in one place. This is probably not decent of me since I'll be moving at the end of the summer and leaving Matt behind. But, since I'm the one who's always alone and always trying not to be, not him, I expect he won't mind.
After I woke up, Matt called me and asked if I wanted to go to a late dinner with him and Kelly. Matt is waking up early tomorrow (today, really) to drive Kelly to get her wisdom teeth out, and she was taking him to dinner to thank him. I had to explain about the nightmare on the phone. At dinner, my hands shook.
In between, though, I took a pretty good shower and went for another drive to Farmer City, west of Champaign on US-150. I guess it helped, a little. Not as much as I'm used to.
Last week I went out of boredom, I think, or maybe it was another bad day in politics (last time I cried about Dr. Tiller: Friday). It had been raining all day and was still foggy out. I'd never noticed before how all the buildings out there are white, all of them. All of them seem to have the same pitch to their roofs, too, which are all forest green, gray, or white.
US-136 has a junction with US-150 possessive of both a four-way stop and a flashing red light, which last week winked at me slowly pinkly, a benevolent aureole or a red beacon in a sea of milk. Today, sitting in a white sky with good visibility, it was only an intermittently lit red point on a line.
Lots of other things were the same, though. There isn't actually a lot of corn grown out here-- it's mostly soybeans-- but the summer has grown advanced enough, and recently it's rained enough, that the corn is finally distinguishable from the other crops in color and kind. It's hedged in by grass that's roughly its own height, though not for long.
The soy fields are better. In some places, they taper smoothly into perfect expansive and English lawns tended by riding mowers. In others, they foam suddenly into wildflowers and prairie grasses, a greener analogue to the crest of gravel that follows the shoulder of the road, and making me wonder about the meaning of a "frontier" in these places.
This area is divided, then molded, by bodies of water such as the Sangamon River and Salt Creek. On lots that border these, the soybeans hug the shape of the river and the edges of the stands of trees like a rock garden flooded green, premature to human nourishment.
On days such as these, the landscape of central Illinois reminds me a lot of rooms like Matt's and mine, with their wooden floors and high windows with their molding painted white. With its never-tended ivy obscuring the windows, and blue curtains between me and the leaves, my room is a variation on this type: as much like a leafy tent as a box of light whose character is quiet. Matt's room, barely lived in yet, is a better example, and the white houses along US-136 have the kind of narrow windows that move me to fantasize about the rooms inside.
It's comforting to know that such unabashedly physical realities (if more so than things like food or sex or comfort) can exert a pull on me, exact a toll. I've been spending a lot of time alone lately, in my hot little house, reading After Many A Summer Dies the Swan and wondering when next I'll love more than one person with the decency to stay in one place. This is probably not decent of me since I'll be moving at the end of the summer and leaving Matt behind. But, since I'm the one who's always alone and always trying not to be, not him, I expect he won't mind.