Late Summer Pastoral

(Forest, Stable, Field, Red Brick Home, Barn, and Forest Once More)

There was only the road, and on the sides gravel, 3/4 inch crushing as they called it. Nice, though the eye and mind and spirit does scan the atmosphere for something. A hawk glides overhead. Blue air, and white wispy clouds. Then a stable. It’s always there, of course, if you go that way. 

‘I forget about that place. It does hide though. You think it’s here but you have passed it. Or…you think you have passed it but it is here.’ There is a horse and a donkey and a goat. They stand and are in the sun and there is some kind of table and it’s quiet looking by and by and peaceful seeming. Beyond is woodlands. When it rains they must go inside. When it’s cold they must go inside, no? And at night also. They have a design upon the wall outside, like a star, but not an esoteric or symbolic star of any sort, that’s just its aura, just a simple happy star because the sign is symmetrical, handsome, and it fits. Suddenly there is a field. Some tall reeds at the sides. And its spaciousness is good for the eye. ‘Those are hay barrels,’ she says. 

‘Aren’t they called bales? I thought ‘bales,’ but people might call them barrels also. I don’t know.’

They are yellow and rolled up, left nicely spaced and foiled against things. I’d say there was a bird on one but there was not. After, in a second, a small looking red brick house. 

‘It’s quite in from the road,’ I mention, ‘just somehow better, more private, spaced out, and if there was ever a cat or dog it’s much safer being away from roads further in on property.’ 

I imagine times before, when people went into town only sometimes for supplies, and called it ‘Going into town,’ or even after, when there was no Sunday shopping, only family and church. I don’t know if that’s good or bad though, I just imagine the times. Back further and onward, but part of it all, sits a humongous barn, set on a concrete form and stones, showing several windows and the sides are yellow, but a pale yellow almost white. What’s in there? I realize I don’t know well enough anyone like a farmer or ranch owner. I can’t roam those areas and get photography or stories or poems. What a shame, as each of the places is a world and there are surely worlds within worlds and worlds within them. What of the rain barrels or feral cats, or the vines that have grown somewhere or groups of unexpected wildflowers? Surely one or some have a stream hidden somewhere far in back, and what of the flora and fauna and atmosphere around there and the washed stones or the moss or anything at all? I guess there are red rocks and ones and yellow also, like in that stream I used to see by the far forest trail. Then it ends in the sense that the forest begins again, begins for real at once. I see tall trees and imagine for seconds the deer, coyotes, foxes, even wild rabbits or little birds, birds alighting briefly in trees to look around at the shaded worlds.