January 28, 2016

With this ring, I thee wed.

I promised myself I would write everyday. Everyday I would come to this magic place I love where round windows are portals to other worlds, where stone and glass floors remind me I am earth bound, allowed only to leave while I write and safe here away from a world that is turning and churning into red clay.
 Here my heart knows safe harbor.The noise of the machines are their own music as they hum and taste the richness of clay on their tongues and feast on memories of babies learning to walk, baseball games and black farmers on the edges of town cultivating their crops for their own and for the city folks. I  tuck my tears beneath my wings,  today they gush like mountain waterfalls over roads and barricades and a big white farm house that is no longer where it is supposed to be.For richer or poorer, I call Matthews my home, in sickness and in health, I find my way here. When I first came here, between Matthews and Charlotte,
mail could not be delivered to my small cottage
 much to my delight. I had to have a post office box.
 Matthews is morphing, the country town is changing.
The traffic is  overbearing even at  five in the morning, even at eleven at night.

Down the road before you get to farmer Groves’ front patch
and off down Brackenberry, one brick ranch was leveled in the
 middle of the night and markers
for three new ones are in place.
 Or down Ballantyne way  where I rode my bike, flew like the wind down to Marvin and over to South Carolina, rounded the bend one day and there for as far as the eye could see red clay and the smell of earth, of clay, of yesterday. “Go on ahead,” I whisper. “I am content to stay here, be wed here, always.”