Castoffs Dilapidated old pickup trucks with cracked windshields and missing headlights rest where they last stopped. They are partially masked by high grasses and uninhibitedly draped with leafy vines. These relics are parked forever in vacant lots; fields and gardens sharing space with rotting gateposts and rusting plow blades, bedsprings and other detritus of recently bygone eras. Driving by these sights you fail to see them or if you do see them you mind rejects them. Another time you may drive by and see them as eyesores and wish they could be committed to the soil or cast off into some space out of your sight. The pickup, gateposts, the plow blades or bedsprings may not be all together in one place all the time, but some of them may be. Then again parts and pieces small and large that defy description may replace them. Where are these piles of cast-offs? We would all like to think these sights all live on the other side of the tracks or out of sight at the end of long dirt roads in the countryside. Faint hope. They are nearby though not in gated enclaves. They are on your way to work or to the beach. They are found near well-traveled highways or scenic country lanes. They will take eons to recommit themselves to the soil all the while acting as their own grave markers. They will all be recalled by nature but it will indeed take time. They are part of the landscape as much as trees and flowers and they share their mystery with us. Remove these scraps and you will cease to question what drew them to this sorry state. Remove them and replace them with stately trees, aromatic vines and fields of flowers. Remove them and surround yourself with broad vistas of beauty remarkable only in their sameness and consistency. Remove them and let your senses drowse. We need the occasional bit of scrap, rust, peeling paint or decay to appreciate the gifts of nature we see and walk by every day. Abandoned things left by the wayside serve a very useful purpose and how we respond to them is what makes us unique. That rusting gate, the old pickup resting on blocks in the vacant lot, those ‘things’ whose worth has long been plundered meant something to someone once. They may be a blot on the landscape to a gardener, the gist of a novel to a writer, the subject if an oil or water color by an artist or a jewel in the lens of a photographer.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Jun 2013 15:59:12 +0000
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