I have a relationship with this place that I may never fully understand.
It is where I'm from.
But sometimes I'd rather not feel so connected to a place where I know I'll never live again. On those acres, generation after generation of my family lived their lives but that ends with me.
If I felt no connection, if I felt no love, it would be easier to walk away. But I do love it.
While there, I always feel a strange struggle between decay and life, permanence and impermanence, past and present.
What once was a giant forest became a field of cotton, then milo, then soybeans and then, became a forest again. Only to be wiped away
by the jaws of angry insect creatures of steel.
And all of this living and dying has occurred during my life while I was away thinking all things there remained constant.
But these cycles extend far beyond my life. Trees became lumber, lumber became structures, structures became rot and rot nurtured trees.
And as all these things happen, the human emotions seem to linger like ghosts haunting these places- like the pride someone must have felt when this silo was complete.
I still feel it. I still see it. In the precisely laid horizontals and finely mitered corners, there are emotions. Human emotions.
And now as it decays, as it turns into something unintended, it seems at peace with its surroundings. They all become one.
