The fog settles on the city
like a down filled blanket
softening the edges of a
hard and indifferent place.
***
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Monday, August 24, 2020
2000 Souls
Orleans, Indiana is a town of 2000 souls and from 1975 to 1985 I was one of those souls, albeit a small one. There were pockets of darkness hidden in neighborhoods that I mostly avoided but sometimes brushed up against for the briefest of moments.
My Dad was a pastor and it was expected I would not hang out with the “bad” kids, but that was OK because I was mostly a loner anyway. I had friends, but none that wouldn’t turn on me in a heartbeat if expedient to do so. Maybe it was something about me?
I spent much of my time roaming the streets of this town on my bike. There were no helmets, no cell phones, and no sense that something could go terribly wrong. And if it did, it passed me over and found some other kid or family to haunt for years to come.
There was the town square with the drug store and its comic book rack, the movie theater showing “First Blood”, a ceramics store where my Mom painted things to decorate our house, and the variety store with three levels of secondhand treasures.
There was the high school with its palatial basketball gym but primitive cinder track, the elementary school with Patton Field for Little League games, and the nearby airstrip with ultralights waiting to take to the sky like giant mechanical dragonflies.
There was melancholy by the rick load though I didn’t really know what that was back then. It was the air I breathed and a persistent heaviness in my chest. It drew me at times to the massive cemetery to brood, the quietest of quiet places.
And it is the town that most thoroughly put its stamp on me, a decade of growth and development from 1st to 10th grade in the heart of Southern Indiana. I love it in the way someone would love a good-enough parent because that’s who raised you.
***
