a place without time :: essays papers

a place without term From the mountains, you can see it coming. Time sits on the survey like rain clouds, holding out. In the cities you carry it more or less in your pocket. Time is organized around where you have to be. You dash blindly around busy corners, always racing against it. But in the mountains, the earth sits on the horizon, refusing to move. Before I ever went to the city, I used to know what that meant. presently I found myself trying to remember, waking up every morning time to look at the mountains and see what they held. If there were clouds there, you knew there might be rain. But I knew there was something to wait for. I could watch time coming. I returned home because I was still longing for the clouds to roll everywhere the skyline and the water to flow from the hills. It was if time was losing her memory, as the city had do me lose mine. My father used to say, when he would look down at his feet, they look the same, but the ground is diff erent. I dont know if he was forgetting things too, or remembering them all so well. My father carried it too, in his pocket, so he wouldnt forget. When people asked about it, he would bring it out and laugh. My sister and I needed our father to hold together our memories, to hold together the world before we were born. The world before our time. Where I lived, there were smashed bugs on the windshield, skittish coyotes, and, of course, trout. My dad remembered the river where he taught me about the sands of time, and how to fish. He verbalize that in the days before me there had been fish the size of polished children willing to take what ever gift God, or my dad, had to offer. So when I came home, I brought my dad to that stream, looking for a cure. Anyone who lives long enough begins to be infected by a search for time. You look for it everywhere because it is life. later a while, you can feel it in the ground beneath your feet, in the creeks in the back canyons, in the c louds over the hills that may never come after back.