You cannot stare at the house long enough to make it age, no, it ages alone, and its windows and their tears cry to themselves, each feeling alone, beyond captured - beyond broken glass - taken in the moment.
When the highest point of any rooftop is the lightning rod, with its cable peeling down and into the soil and souls of the used-to-live-here, then and only then, can one feel the moments of heavy storms that calmed the dust, and rattled the windows, and kept the people alive and praying for the gathered rain to feed the ground.
The trees were once green, the grass stood tall, the roots of those plants are withered as the memories, and the plow shares have cut the element of time from the memories of the abode. Watch the clouds, they change soon enough.
Ralph E Peck
Photo by Terry Wasson
West of Hiway 81 in Oklahoma 1982
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