Bloom by: Banna Haman, Archival Inkjet Print, 2018
As the scene turns unimportant and the words heard lose all sense, as downstairs chatter irritates the ears and fills the brain, and as the dimmed sunlight corresponds with it all, waking up happens. Out of the comfortable plastic smell of air mattress and into cookie cutter Midwestern interior design, where breakfast and stressful aunt talk wait. The beginning of the day’s happening starts with mild hurry, fast milk and soggy grains down the gullet and to the young and showy/midlife-crisis fast car. Long drive past stretching fields of soy to woods that stretch further. With the backseat lull, sleep comes back but doesn’t stay. less than a week we’ll be here and forgotten weight creeps back into subtle presence.
The complaint of cousin’s speed turning interrupts the gossiping of moms a few times, but the ambiance remains with the consistent motion of metal surrounding and passing. Now closer then further as eighteen wheelers and holiday minivans share the scene of now farmland and billboards for casinos, Cracker Barrels, and adult video stores with trucker discounts. Once across the bridge over the Wabash River, into Illinois, forest fills the sides of the freeway again. Coming into Vienna, the roads cut through the ground and rock shaped by dynamite, my anxious thoughts surrender to peaceful participation in shared nostalgia.
Passing through the town of cute decrepit buildings where this relative did this and that relative did that and this is where Granny’s flower shop that burned down was and this is where your great grandparents used to live, and so on. A stop at an antique shop of knick-knacks and furniture from the forties and things moms like decorating their houses with, then to meet up with our uncle. We met on the graveled Snow Hill road, trees with bulbous bases like heads sticking out on each side, this the place where Granny used to live. There was a shed with small items for my mom, and beyond that there was little other reason to visit. I wandered off to the narrow strip of property still owned by the family nearest to the wooded area. Granny’s trailer had new owners that were apparently crazy, but that little land connected with the east side of the pond that hours of vacation time engulfed. After dinner with my brother, uncle, aunt, mom and cousins, we headed back to Indiana.
The time spent there, engaged as I had been, simplified more problems than I thought even then. The simplicity of continuing, the worth of every detail I was convinced I considered correctly, satisfaction and all those usual realizations one gets from these sort of humbling retreats. Here and there differs in little ways, but there gives something sounder than the day to day can offer, a place I love.