Aaaaand, we're back....

I just came home from a steady place. Each complacent pond and every wine-red sunset testifies every day of the unalterable quality of the rolling hills of Kansas. Hills past endurance. Hills that share their fountain of youth, the elixir sheltered deep in limestone treasuries, with each inanimate object that sets root there. Buildings buy immortality with their motion. They sacrifice their activity, their soul, to share in the promise of immortality. Lifeless but never dead.

Chips of paint flee their homes, the now cold sides of never-dying houses. A vine reaches through a defunct window, to devour its rotten wood. Roofs implode. Insects stake claim in dark corners of shudder-cold building-caves. They construct mud temples with their spittle. Mindless hives for raising imps who learn to prey on more noble creatures. Still the house stands.

A boy stares at the undying houses; Two horizontal lines left on a white canvas. Balance. Peace. Reliability.

The boy sighs, alone, but content, and leaves the still unmoving houses to their rest.

***

Written in Very Early Youth

Calm is all nature as a resting wheel.
The kine are couched upon the dewy grass;
The horse alone, seen dimly as I pass,
Is cropping audibly his later meal:
Dark is the ground; a slumber seems to steal
O'er vale, and mountain, and the starless sky.
Now, in this blank of things, a harmony,
Home-felt, and home-centered, comes to heal
That grief for which the senses still supply
Fresh food; for only then, when memory
Is hushed, am I at rest. My Friends! restrain
Those busy cares that would allay my pain;
Oh! leave me to myself, nor let me feel
The officious touch that makes me droop again.

- William Wordsworth