For Picture Number Four

From Vishnu's Bounty

She stands in sunlight, the baby in her arms, waiting to be fed.

This land, scorched with heat now, will be buried like Atlantis when the monsoons hit. The rain will be torrential, a living thing, the clouds all she will be able to see through the crippling downpour. The river where she washes the baby will no longer be peaceful; springing from Vishnu's feet, it will nourish, raze, destroy.

Her feet are as rooted to this river as Vishnu himself. Famine, heat, bloated bodies fouling the banks - it makes no difference. She has known, and will know, no other home.

That's wonderful, Deb.

For Photo # 1: [link]

Before he enlisted, Hugh and Margaret used to drive to the top of the ridge on Saturdays and look down across the valley. “There’s our farm,” he’d say, and point to the land his father had promised him, land where corn grew tall and black-and-white cows grew fat and gave sweet milk.

Before he lies down to sleep each night and just as he awakens each morning he looks at the picture. He fills in the colors--the many greens of the valley, the gentle, hazy blue of the summer sky, the glossy brown of Margaret’s hair and her steady hazel eyes.

He fights to live. He fights to go home.

Susan, that's a lovely piece.

One.

That morning, I went to the mailbox expecting the usual. Looking through the junk, the envelope fell onto the sidewalk. The handwriting was my own from sixty years ago. “Return to Sender – US ARMY” stamped on it.

My own words of love, words of promise, of great news to share. I miss you, I want you, I need you. Please come home soon, I can’t do this with out you.

My brother took the picture on our way home from the doctor’s office. Jim proposed there. We spent our last night there. It was the last spot we made love. I can smell junipers and jasmine.

After we got word, I couldn’t leave this place. It was home. The closest thing I had to him

(A little long)

And, Susan and I are in the same brain space.

That picture made me think of northeast Pennsylvania, where I used to try to go every summer when I lived in Philly so I could stand on hills and look at corn growing. I don't think it actually is PA--the hills aren't quite the right shape. But that's what it made me think of, and I took the note on the picture and went from there.

And Aimee makes me all misty-eyed!

Funny - it reminds me of California. Specifically, the pictures Kristin linked to from her drive down the coast.

Oh, Aimee, how lovely and ghosty.

If I had to guess where it actually is, I'd say Oregon or Washington, by the number of trees and the angles of the hills. But it still pinged my rural Pennsylvania brainspace somehow--probably because that's one of the places I'm intermittently homesick for.