Journal Entry #8 (2014)
I wondered sometimes why we all seemed very determined to look the other way at things that were not realistically good for us at all. I don't know how it happened but the mists of delusion, or something more sinister and less definable, eased into our souls and left us with a blind spot.
What did we see? We saw beauty in a raw form. We had both studied horticulture (landscaping, actually) and we both had a deep sense of obligation toward the landscape, at one time or so I thought.
We saw old old structures being choked out by wild blackberry bushes. We saw the varied shades of grey, of rock, set in cement–crumbling. What was it?
A smoker. No, not a man smoking a cigarette in the forest. It was a wood smoker meant for flavouring meat. I never was certain of the kind of meat. There were no signs of anything inside but the remains of crumpled cement. Tiny globes frozen in time. Charred wood, bits and pieces of it, nestled in the back, in the dark, on the floor. But the site was nothing special. It looked like any other to me. That was on the north-west side of the house.
Nestled serenely in the woods, it gave an illusion of calm. A trick of masterful proportions.
On the day we viewed the house, for the final time, sun filtered through October leaves. All seemed to be maple. Sugar maple. Other trees existed there, but that day it was only maples in my view. All yellow in the blue sky.
To the North, a view lay for miles, incomprehensibly beautiful. Some ancient soul inside of me yearned for that view. I wanted it so badly.
The rest was mostly a blur. I did not see the rusted piles of junk covering rock piles of debris. Trash, unknown things, looming in the woods, like an ancient burial mound. No wind blew that day. In fact, it was so beautiful, it made me feel possessive. Jealous.
Push the deal through, I said to myself. Buy it. Make it mine.
Inside, we sat at a small table. Inside seemed interesting and bright and full of promise. The trees loomed gracefully. It seemed like a place unlike any other in the entire world.
Deep behind the house were all those tiny glass pop bottles, some he built into the foundation. You could look out through them for a murky view into the back yard. It wasn't done to save money, nor for the sake of the environmental regulations. No. They were placed there for some reason that could only be described as "other". Some other reason. Portals.
All these little things existed just out of reach, out of vision. The smoker stood like a small sentinel. The bottles did whatever it was they were supposed to do. Deeper into the woods, deadfall sprawled like a drunken spider's webs, in massive proportions. Layers of decayed leaves covered the entire acre and more lay silent in their pulpous graves. Dead things were rotting. Worms were eating. Spiders were sucking life juices from flies. Bones were calcifying.
The wind lay silent. It did not move. Snow was so far away, it seemed like a bother you brushed aside in annoyance. Oh, we can handle a little snow.
Ha ha ha.
I began this chapter by wondering how it is we end up remaining in some sort of state of discomfort for long periods of time. And so it was with us. We were so allured by the things that had revealed themselves, we cared about nothing else. Hope sprang so very high. And like the sun sinking over the horizon, it started to go down, down, down. Not at first, no. Not abruptly. But like the Earth spins in space and time moves on and the day drips away to emptiness, the reality of our home became something else because it was something else. It was some other world. We tried to live our lives.
We were young. What did we know?
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