It grew its face over three thousand years. During that time, short in the mind of the moon, we had not noticed it growing.
The sea had its source in the rising sun, and the sun rose from the hills where the town began.
There is a legend that a child once rode his horse to the top of the last hill, and saw the river rising from the mouth of the rising sun. He was struck dumb by the sight, and didn’t speak for eighty years. Then on his deathbed he made the cry that has now become a legend about the river and the sun. He was buried on the brow of the hill where the building grew for three thousand years and no one noticed.
The air here is translucent. Sometimes the light has the colour of jewels too long in the sun. The light from the river makes everything brighter. The houses are yellow. The roofs are blue. The windows are green. The lawns are golden and the porches are red. The gables are black. These are the colours we call them, but not the colours that they are.
The light from the river makes all things glow. There is a sparkle in simple things. Our boats are made of dreams.
In our farms we plant light. The wheat and the corn, the tomatoes and the roses and the beans grow from this light. Our harvests are rich with songs. Things grow silently here, but at night you can hear the moon waxing. It makes a low hum over the farms and the blue rooftops, and swells our bodies with fat dreams. Often we have to strap the children to the beds to stop them lifting into the sky.
The house that our forefathers and foremothers built on the hill was built with stones from the river. The women found the stones and washed them with their hands and their tears. They dried them on their breasts. Sometimes they nestled the stones in their beds and warmed them with their sleeping breath.
When the stones were too big, the women slept on them by the river. The men bore the stones at dawn before the river rose from the face of the sun.
The house was built slowly, as all true houses should be. A wall took a hundred years. The floor took two hundred. Each pillar took a hundred more. Three generations raised its roof. Its door made from an oak felled by lightning took seventy years to shape. A long line of artisans honed the images on its face. Every child lent its life and its play to the house. The sun lent its humour. The air cleaned the face of our labours.
Three thousand years and no one noticed the house was growing, because it grew from the silence of our lives. Then we forgot the house that the sun had been building, forgot it in the times that came. The turning of the mills and the spreading roads took us away from the river.
Only now when we had long lost it, long forgotten that the river rose from the rising sun, do we see the picture that time has made. Only now do we notice the smile on the house, the smile on the face that has always been there.