YOU MAY THINK that I was bored, but this was not the case. You may reasonably suspect that I was lonely, but except for wishing for a dog, I wasn't.
Not particularly.
I did find everyday life to be a strange experience, like being shipwrecked, or left behind on the moon when the last spacecraft departs for earth, but I kept myself busy, walking through the fields and observing all the subtle changes as summer gave up its last great blast of hot air while the animals who knew the drill were preparing for the hard times to come.
Winter on the prairie is like death.
Autumn, which can be gorgeous, is no time to stop and smell the sunflowers. For those in the know, it's the busy season.
I wondered about the kids at school.
Were they having lunch now? Were they cutting up and carrying on and laughing? What kind of shoes was everybody wearing this year? Last year, it was black basketball shoes. This year was bound to be different.
I think my mother has never gotten over the loss of my father.
I think that's why she sits around and watches TV
I took a picture of a baby pumpkin. It looked like an acorn, except it was much bigger and green. There is no logical explanation for how a single pumpkin seed becomes a jungle littered with fat, heavy orange orbs.
Oh, I know that scientists say they've figured it out. I know about photosynthesis, and cell division, and all of that. But really now. One little seed the size of a fingernail becomes a huge, wild thicket of ropelike vines? Orange, basketball-size fruits that contain ten thousand or more copies of the seed that started them?
A scientific explanation, perhaps.
But logical?
I think not.
Perhaps, I reasoned, there is some connection between my camera and my dreams.
My dreams are populated with people from Paisley. Neighbors, shopkeepers, teachers, kids, bus drivers, waitresses, pizza delivery-men—even babies and dogs. Over the course of time, they all show up in my dreams.
In my dreams, Paisley lives.
The camera, too, is a way to hold on to the past, in a fragmentary, visual, dreamlike way. More than extension of memory, as I had previously observed.
A giver of life.
Could the logical explanation have something to do with this?
I'm not lonely. But sometimes after I dream about a particular person or event, I wake up crying.
I wish I could tell someone.
I wish I could step back into the dream and keep it going.
I wish I didn't have to let go of everything I've ever known.
Chief Leopard Frog was only part right. I needed something to do not only with my hands.
I needed something to do with my thoughts.
Tremendous thunderstorms rolled through one night, the kind that explode like mortar shells, tilt pictures on the wall, and rattle windows. By morning, the prairie was as squishy as a bathroom sponge and the pumpkin patch looked like the creature from the haunted lagoon, its dangling ringlet tendrils grasping for the paint-chipped windows of the house.
Leaping expertly from a single silk tightrope, a spider as fat as a California grape ducked behind a leaf when it saw me coming with my camera. Filtered through gauzy cloud cover and illuminating a newly refreshed world, the sunlight itself was green, causing Paisley to glow like the Emerald City.
My destination this time was Crossroads Circle.
According to a stapled-together sixteen-page pamphlet from the Franks collection, published by D. Potts Small Town Histories, Davenport, Iowa, Crossroads Circle in Paisley was once a busy intersection of two rural highways, with an elevated walled circle in the center in which was planted a colorful garden of pansies, or zinnias, or mums, depending on the season, and from which rose a flagpole bearing the proud if somewhat overdesigned banner of the United States of America.
"Stars AND stripes?" the anonymous author had opined. "One or the other, but not both."
Because most people don't expect to encounter a traffic roundabout way out in the country, virtually every vehicular accident that ever happened in Paisley happened here, including a single-vehicle crash involving a street sweeper.
Once upon a time, it was a busy place.
Around the circle, shops congregated shoulder to shoulder, harmoniously, like dairy cattle gathered around a feeding station.
Some shopkeepers sold fresh meat. Some sold homemade candy. Some sold goat's milk soap. Some, as I've mentioned, such as Mrs. Franks, sold books.
One place that I remember myself sold original yard art created from rusted farm implements and kitchen utensils. My favorite was the armadillo family made from airtight Tupperware bowls.
Crossroads Circle was the heart of Paisley, where the people whose front yards were measured not in feet but in acres came to spend a little time with people like themselves—or not, as the case may be.
Mankind wasn't meant to live alone.
God had that figured out right after he created Adam.
Spencer Adams Honesty.
The last kid in Paisley, Kansas.