Cemetery Road
“I’ve rambled lately, without much inspiration or success. The places I seem to want to go, elude me, and hunting season is not the best time to be mucking about. Private property continues to be a huge annoyance, although I respect it, to a point. My research, regarding boundaries, has led me to meditate on the changes in Vermont, and in how we consider the land. The loss of farmland here, is lamentable on many levels. Finding myself on a road I remembered as remote, now filled with huge equestrian centers, and fashionable, refurbished old buildings, my emotions are varied. The one, now abandoned house left standing, is lit with an eerie, blameless light, the kind that pierces a structure from west to east, at sundown, revealing nothing within. We’d been invited, on one occasion, to visit, as guests of the sawyer, who cut our lumber, and who proudly showed us his antique cars, stored adjacent to the mill. It wasn’t so pretty inside, where he passed his nights, as he was alone there, and growing older, without any family to share his dwelling, or help him keep it up. Maybe I bought an old trunk off him, or he, off me; I can’t remember now. We rode with him, one sunny 4th of July parade, down the main street of a local town, in one of his refurbished Model Ts. I was not aware of a lot of things, back then, certainly not, the passage of time. I attended his wake, perhaps the first time I’d seen a body, laid out like that. The pieces of that life, mine, his, it all appears to me now, like a dream. I searched for a clue, last week, passing the cemetery road, but not daring to enter, as new tract homes had replaced the yard where he’d cut his logs, and piled his resources, in some kind of logical order. Circling his place twice, self-conscious of who might be watching, I realized I had little room left, to poke about. A suburban mentality had replaced his free-wheeling sprawl, one that had once described jobs, and work, no longer viable or wanted. I drove circles, trying to recall who I’d been, or the feelings I’d once had, eventually settling on the route of the creek, where I’d once found vacant miles. Bought up by a music celebrity I’d heard, then settled again, most likely by software engineers or similar professionals, searching for their own piece of heaven. It was still, beautiful, everywhere, though gentrified, and modified. I pulled over and idled, at the covered bridge, as the day’s colors began to intensify, filtered through the bare November trees, illuminating a frigid, tumbling water. This is change, I thought. Just that. It starts one way, and goes another, as society discovers new territory to exploit, according to its current, contemporary fantasy of what is best, and what’s to be coveted. I think that in this terrain, however, it was not always the case. The land did give, however you had to work it, and be subservient to all its tricks, and wiles. There was little here to plug into, next to nothing. So you had to hire yourself, and show up each day, and do something useful on your own terms. Your lifetime was yours, though you might, oddly, be left with nothing, in the end, but the invisible effort you’d given back to the land. Which I guess, despite how sad, or impoverished, or forgotten you knew you were, was accepted, by the almighty, as a life, many times, worth living.
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