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A Peace in Our Time
By John Grey
QuailBellMagazine.com
A man walked across the stark black lava
of the Craters of the Moon. He was not on the moon. He was in Idaho stepping through a maze of cinder cones, craters and rifts. He did not know the woman cheering on her favorite turtle at Northeastern University in Boston, as these carapaced track stars sauntered down their 29 foot marathon course toward the distant finish line. Neither were aware of the man who scrambled out to the tip of Scott's Bluff in Nebraska,
rising up out of the clay cliffs to scan
the traces of the Oregon trail. All were in the dark regarding the woman in the clock museum of Newport, New Hampshire. Under cover of their ignorance, she dutifully examined each of Esley Hallett's historic timepieces including water clocks, sundials, hour glasses, even a clock powered by an old wagon spring. And none of these people had the slightest inkling of what was going on in Caryville, Florida, site of the International Worm Fiddling Contest. A man watched intently as another drove a wooden stake into the ground, rubbed it so it vibrated under the earth, drove the worms up through the soil's pores. It was as if in one point of the history of the nation, every one that mattered was off doing a different thing. A woman rode a gondola on the Wabash. A child watched an old man carve a bird in Salisbury, Maryland. There was something to keep each occupied but nothing that could draw them all together. There was no war, no disaster. The peace, the quiet was about the bump-jumping in Petoskey, Michigan and the pumpkin show in Circleville, Ohio. All lost memory of when they had been joined at the hip. All separated, spread out to the oddest places on the map. A child entered the house of "Little Boy Blue" in Saint Louis. A woman strolled through the Village of Violets in Rhinebeck, New York. It was as if they had somehow said, in their silence, no more death, no more dread, no more. Just the dumb things. Are you with me?
#Unreal #Nostalgia #APeaceInOurTime #Americana
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