more than anywhere else i know, it is a place of united tradition and holding on to what has always been. change, bound to happen, is financial opportunity slow to arrive, and a transplanting of the outcast; strugglers coming into the land of old hands at struggling, and a return of the retired.
trucks, full of the big city’s trash, come one after another to empty their load in the pits, made where coal company machinery ate farmland. scattered everywhere are tracks of coal mining lakes that the company didn’t bother to fill in.
mosquitoes thrive in the warm humid landscape of summer, bug spray a common purchase.
in this place are the few people of a simple faith. a set strength of humor and caring, is prevalent, keeping the odds at bay. prayer chains, and family is the string that holds the brown paper folded against the package.
relation dots the countryside.
baseball is considered the national sport and the small schools do well to keep a competitive field. some of the best players have grown up in this place. this place of corn fields and lighting bugs.
it begs one to slow down and listen, restore an old car, have reunions, stop to have lunch with friends. a place of town-wide garage sales and friday fish fries. upcoming events hang by a push pin on corked boards. and some think that there is nothing going on.
three years
It is coming to the end of my time in Illinois. Three years ago, I came here in the throws of the breakup of a thirty year marriage. The marriage was breaking apart for many years. It's too bad
that I didn't know many of the things that I have learned in the last three years about myself and
about the interactions of certain relationship.
I now have a better understanding of what I could have done for myself and for the relationship.
I can now see much of my own part in the problems. And worked through some of that.
I don't know if Peter had to look back on his part. He was in a place to move nicely into his next relationship and a marriage.
Now, I am going back to Oregon. It is time to live in the house that has become mine.
And hope to see the people that I have grown fond of in Illinois. And I would like see, face to
face, some people that I have met online.
I would also like to travel to some places with friends.
I can't talk about love. Language can not describe it.
But, I sometimes see it, and feel it. Alive and living in the living of moments.
Sometimes I must decide to get past myself, and just open my heart.
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