Visual Poetry

     I began this day like any other, up before the sun and helping everyone prepare for their day. I scraped ice off of the car windows and wrasteled toddlers into their seats. Finally on the road to preschool I got into a zone where the details and hassels of life faded away. I zeroed in on my surroundings and this is what I saw.

     We live in a small town carved out of the middle of the Croatan National Forest. I drove along the winding road lined with a virtual wall of forest impregnated with a foggy mist. I miss the secure feeling of being surrounded by the mountains, but the forest and the fog embraced me this morning. All along the long country road, past the solitary mail boxes, one of which used a small palm tree as its post. Past the red and white farm house next door to a house that is trying its hardest to return to the earth from wence it appears to have come. Past a lone chicken clucking on the sandy shoulder, then left at the once white southern style church with above ground crypts. When I reach the little house that is being reclaimed by the woods, left again. I always pause and wonder about this house that the trees have overtaken. They grow up through the roof and chimney, their limbs burst through the windows. I wonder who once lived there and why they left their home. I wonder about the many happy nights the family must have spent next to the hearth cooking over an open fire. I always imagine that they were happy, in a little house in the middle of the woods, because I think I would be happy there too.

Jennifer

22 January 2015