Mountain towns -
Dairy Queen and laundromats.
Generations of families
never leaving
never living anywhere else.
Square little homes and
chain link fences,
stuck in time.
Knee high weeds
growing along the street;
part of the scenery,
beautification
or stagnation?
On Main Street
where they know everyone and where
they sell
boiled peanuts by the pound,
that transient tourists buy and
spit out the shells in brown paper bags.
A man spits on the ground in front of the car repair shop,
dirty white t-shirt,
stained black fingernails.
The rest gather out front,
cigarettes and laughs,
hard faces, brown and wrinkled
from too much sun,
too much drink.
Mama, with her three babies,
one is asleep in the stroller - on its last leg from pushing all of her babies-
two are down to the cone,
white ice cream all over their sticky faces
and shirts.
CVS looks out of place with its
bright gray façade, lit up at night,
a contrast
when everything else has a blue cast
from the mounds of mountains backdrop.
Mountains with cool springs and breezes,
every road has a pretty view.
Are hearts here fond of the mountains that watch over them in their sleep?
Or are those great blue masses like angels, watching but no one notices?
Up and down these mountain roads
runaway trucks have a place to go,
But everyone dies here,
their name engraved in stone
buried beside relatives.
The cemetery is the town’s record keeper,
of generations on that hill,
keeping mountain town secrets, too;
secrets the city folk won’t get
the tourists can’t know
and passing through,
all I can do is stop counting cows, now1.
I feel a pang -
is it sympathy? nostalgia?
maybe jealousy?
Memories of a simple childhood flood in,
where all my needs were met.
My mountains taught me how to drive,
switchbacks and lower gears,
coasting down, down.
My mountains taught me how to hide,
I can keep those secrets, too.
Yet in my mountains,
all I noticed were the bats flying around the tall poles at the ball field -
the one ball field we’d all played on for generations -
and the mountain laurel, bursting like Fourth of July fireworks;
Not the screeching sound from the chain link fence
when it opened and closed.
Nor the run down car shops
with the tires and rims piled out front.
Roadside weeds made the best bouquets,
and the views,
the ones I missed only when I left those mountains,
take my breath away, now.
Mountain towns,
unchanging,
grit in a flashy, digital world.
We could learn a thing or two
from them -
that all you need is what you have;
people who know you,
and a place to bury your bones,
with a Dairy Queen and a laundromat.
From the car game, Cows and Graveyards, where the players divide up with one half of the car looking out the windows on their side, and likewise for the other. As you pass cow pastures, you count wildly - the goal is to have the most cows at the end of the game. But, if you pass a graveyard on your side, you have to stop counting and start all over again.