anonymity or, a very old entry

from pre-livejournal days...aka pre 2002.

Consider the seemingly utter anonymity of the West. The endless rows of light and dark wheat, fat cows and their young, fences making thick and thin lines like plaid, crooked creeks and long, indeterminately long straight roads that converge like pencil points on the horizon. Also note the discrepencies in each pattern that give them lives of their own. Brown and black cows, tall and short fences, clear and muddy creeks, roads obscured by stagnant dust, and roads that are not.
Consider my older aunts and uncles, the last of their generation, and their children, rooted in the prairie and the dust. They have assumed the patterns that define their homeland, and are as different and alike as it is. Granted, as they sit on folded chairs in the yard, it is obvious that they are cut from the same cloth, and similarly, bound with the same thread to the pastel prairie. For each: plaid, worn shirts like the lay of the land, jeans faded to the color of dust against the sky, and boots the same shade of the earth, and perhaps a product of it. The worn topic of conversation almost invariably being the cultivation of the land itself, and preferably (as i am priviledged to know) no conversation at all. Given to silence, they, as there is no need for conversation during the harvest.

Of course they too are prone to the afflictions which only make us human, and thus as different as day and night. In the end, they are as tall or short as their fences, as light or dark as the wheat. But they bear a striking resemblance to their home, like chameleons on a tree, one that can only be gained by having resided there long enough to assume their surroundings. In the end, we are only wed to the cloth from which we were cut.