Julie’s Machine
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
“The machine knocked it down faster than I could have, with my nail puller. I used to wish I could afford a Volvo station wagon; now I’m able to rent a Volvo backhoe for a week: not too weird an adjustment, if you go with the flow. My life’s been an exercise in hitting walls, backing up, of reframing reality, and figuring out the new angle of attack. Maybe it shouldn’t feel like combat, but it does. Except when I’m dreaming, so ... i do that a lot. It was a dream to raise my kids somewhere they could be free, and I built under them, planning highways of discovery and delight, while they slept. It was my world then, and they got to play there, until it got dark. The nettle patch, the sapling woods, the plank wedged between two branches of a tree. Traipsing barefoot on dirt paths to a bush, or a castle. Who could have warned me that my smiles would turn to dust? I still smile, of course, but on bad days, with less purity & graceful aplomb. For this is no longer my world. As we come off the gap, truck bed filled to the gills with old cedar boards, down below, rain sketches smudges in shades of gray, advancing northward, the color of weathered lumber. Our Craigslist seller, we’ve just left her behind. “If you guys lived over here, we’d be friends”, she’d proclaimed. Her husband recently dead, her formerly pristine stable shuttered and devoid of horses, we’d shuffled into the barn, to move our boards, while she continued to talk. “He worked in the operational center of nuclear power plants” she explained. “He was in Georgia, when I got the call.” He hadn’t been a faithful man. Later, as I sat half on the tail gate deep in communion with my newly acquired, heavy-duty ratchet strap, she fleshed out the story. “23 years, we were together. He had a woman in every state. Last time I saw him, he was leaving, and he didn’t say goodbye. He just slammed the door.” I was pulling the mechanism tight as she said this, and I could feel what a shitty situation it had been, but i didn’t look up. I could relate, easily, it wasn’t hard. Mine didn’t wear a hazmat suit, or sport dreadlocks as was the case in her vivid narration, but mine had been equally clueless. Unaware of what he had, and the ease with which it could all have been set right. A little openness, a little honesty, a little coming to terms with decades of denial implanted by a traumatic childhood. A softening, to allow arms to extend and surround. A cessation of words. Looking around Susan’s over-grown pastureland, hearing the highway impinging on its peacefulness, with Route 89 rudely bisecting the incredible beauty of her land, and destroying her farm, I was hard pressed to figure which came first: the chicken, or the egg. The empty stall, named “Silver”, as printed on the golden plaque. His horse, while hers had been housed across the isle. Off to the right, broken fencing, now encompassing, poorly, the pond, as well as metal farm gates, leading to trails once ridden. Time doesn’t last much longer than you can shake a stick at. Because, when it opens, you’re no longer bound by its tether. She’ll be much happier, eventually, with love returning to her more than she ever imagined, I know this for a fact. Just like the backhoe, scraping old walls to the ground. Run by another unsung operator, Julie, fully creative in her destruction, as she wonders what’s next, and if she’ll ever fully understand the controls that jerk and bind, then flow to the tune of a dancer’s choreography.”