I Believe in Fairies
- So I drove across the North American continent, how 'bout that? So I dug holes in Scotland for a month and a half, how 'bout that? So I'm not doing the music lyrics thing any more, how 'bout that? So I never write any more and I'm in Oregon now. I saw ravens dancing over Beinn Resipol and oaks older than money. I split wood under Scots pines swaying in the summer breeze. Waded through thigh-deep mud in the deep woods, in the ruts between the tamarack trees, and stood in moss-covered clearings in the dappled sunlight. I whistled with larks and croaked with the jays. I gave one rabbit to the mere of a drainage ditch, and the other to the supper table. I rose with the dawn and watched the silver limn crest the trees in Ohio, and Connor and I laughed and laughed. I swept through the wings of a storm, feathers of light casting down onto the Bighorn Mountains behind the thunderhead. I chased pronghorns from butte to butte and ate one-dollar ice-cream over the border in Wyoming. I drew and drew. I sat next to a man who fumed about the youth and their drugs and their sex for three hours on the way out of Inverness, across the sheep-fields. I sat in on the parliament of rooks, and the pheasants gave me their feathers to tie on for luck. The barley glowed amber in the late-afternoon light, as the RAF jets screamed overhead. I walked the beach to the muffled sounds of lapping surf and distant ordinance detonation. I drove all night from Chicago to Ann Arbor and slept a night in a basement with no light but a blue glow that nobody but me could see. Everywhere followed the crows. I stood on the hilltop and saw the future ranged out around me, from the highlands to the deep of the loch. I saw art and loss, I saw love, and I saw a path stretching out ahead of me, tying me by the tread of my feet to the tread of my ancestors' feet. We've done a lot of walking, my family and I. There's a lot of walking to be done yet.