So much of my childhood was spent in the backseat of an Oldsmobile station wagon, traveling from our house in Indiana to my grandparents’ house in southern Illinois. If my dad was in a hurry, he buzzed over on the interstate. But he usually liked to the take the back way, which consisted of long chip-n-seal county roads through endless cornfields. I always loved the sight of old crack-filled barns, rusting tractors, backyard tire swings—proof that life went on here even though it had nothing to do with me.
My wife sometimes jokes that while I’ve been diagnosed as autistic…it’s more accurate to say I’m “awe-tistic.” Shot through with wonder.
Passing through little out-of-the-way towns, I wanted to remember every sensation. Sunlight glinting on dust-covered windshield of old trucks. The way one bulb in the lighted sign at the bank never lit up. Who sat on all those front porch swings? Whose laundry hung on the line? Who did they love, grieve, want to become? And who was I, deep in that backseat and watching it flicker past? I never needed answers. The wondering was enough.
It’s still enough.
Even though I haven’t lived in the midwest for many years now, it’s still (and always will be) the source of my literary inspiration. As evidence, I offer this poem written during the pandemic when the empty hours reminded me so much of childhood.
County-Line Cemetery
Only the very old stop here.
They wander the stones
dreaming lives that blew apart
like so much straw in a storm.
Sisters, maybe. Cousins
come home after a lifetime away.
Every memory like a preserve
turned to vinegar.
The little white church: gone.
The dirt road: paved. Pale orange
& fading, only daylilies
keep on, but even they can't say
what any of it means.
They just shake in the breeze.Now how about you? Where are your sources of literary inspiration? What awe did you touch as a child? What has kept on in you?
Opening a battered storm door every summer. Whitewashed walls. Stone floors. Striped mattresses set out to air. An old range where peat was burned. Washing in basins of rain water or when that dried up, being sent up with hill to the stream. Hedges of dancing fuchsias. Ghosts in the lanes. Donegal. 1970s.
Lovely, Steve. And I very much understand how this road trip, the passing countryside, and the scenery therein became a touchstone for your writing. Mine has been and always will be a childhood spent living on my grandparent's farm in New Jersey. Raised in a granary in back of a the big Haymow, my siblings and I roamed 300 acres full of Angus cattle, hay for baling, barns of many sizes and shapes, ducks, chickens, horse, and always feral cats. My grandmother's stash of dixie cups in the freezer of the farmers porch- always left unlocked, were for us, I realized way later in life. I thought I'd die when we moved to Connecticut in "67 when I was 12, but luckily, my then husband and I bought this place from my Father when the estate passed to him. I fought for it in a recent divorce, and it's mine now at age 70. Always filled with family, albeit many gone now, the beauty and wonder of this house and landscape has never faded, and lives on in my work--a legacy, and heirloom. So, yeah, I totally get it.