Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Interlude: Winter

Camassia is full of tiny ferns and bruise-colored leaves, and sudden shining mirrors have been inset in the hollows, waiting for gleams of sun. I could see chips fly from the woodpecker at his work, though I couldn't hear a sound.

The world is too large for me. I remember a time when I thought people got bigger, as they got older; but it turns out that the world grows much faster than we do. I dodge from cover to cover, like a timid vole, in the scant winter light, and I reach home with relief.

Fields of seablush and camas lily,fields we knew when the world was young.

And yet -- there at Oregon City, where Willamette Falls runs over the edge of the plate, and the river dodges between industrial buildings and power plant -- there is an older world implicit in it all, a world in which people were proud of what they built. Those people wanted their industrial buildings to be plain works of power. I'm confident that the thought that they were defacing the river never shadowed their dreams.

No comments: