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Dry Creek Lane ©Steve Brown, 2014
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A beautiful wet snow clumped on tree branches of wet dark
wood. Slush and stone gray puddles. On the way home, I slowed to see the bald eagle
in his outlook tree—a watch tower to guard the keep, his nest. He was there, as he has been, day after day,
for the past couple of months.
Sometimes I get the itch to go. Now, even the movie theater in town has
closed. Not much left—a couple of
hardware stores, a grocery, a convenient store, a drug store, a seasonal hamburger
joint, a couple of flower shops, a video store and a handful of gas
stations/fast-food combo joints out by the freeway.
A café to sit in and drink hot chocolate and look out on
Main Street and watch the occasional car drive by slopping slush up on the walk
would be nice. But the café closed long
ago.
Yet that land keeps me.
It always has—even when I lived in Dallas, in El Paso, on the Navajo
Reservation. I can’t leave. Juniper, sage, rabbit brush—up top. Oak, maple, cottonwood—along the two creek
bottoms. Deer, eagle, wild turkey—the very
occasional sighting of a bobcat. These
things hold me.
Sometimes I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse.
But everything I am is in this place.
A song by John Denver comes to mind: “Back Home Again”. I don’t care what the critics say, I like it,
and I think I know enough about words to know for myself what is good. What is art, what isn’t—sometimes it seems so
arbitrary.
Often, what captures me most, what binds me, is the simple,
the real.
©Steve Brown, 2015
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