Riverside Park

Sound of car rushing by, on a well-paved road. Sound of suburbia, but this is a park, a woodland amidst the cornfields. But it sounds like every other car and every other suburbia. But it looks like the woods. Which do I trust? Am I in suburbia or the woods? Sound of Harley-Davidson passing by. I’d say suburbia. And yet…

The sound fades and my eyes take over, and my eyes burn as I look into the sun, the white-gold sun that paints silver on one side of each blade of grass. But I cannot stand to look at the gold. Just before my eyes burn out, I flinch, but just before I flinch, I see green light on the edge of the yellow rays, as they merge into blue. Between everlasting fire and infinite cold, there is life, there is green and growing.

Clouds scramble across the sky, trip and tumble as they dash, as the wind whips them onward. The wind – I hear a great mass of leaves rustling, and I call this place woodland. The wind –

Now my nose asserts itself, for something asserts itself to my nose. Something is insisting, even, fairly aggressively. It’s a stink I think I know, but I don’t – I accuse the latrines. Yet down at the river, the stink is still there. Then I remember. This is what you get when you make cereal in a factory: burnt grain. I will never set roots in Cedar Rapids if I can help it. Some smells are awful, and are called evil; some smells are truly evil. This one isn’t on the level of choke-and-die, so this one is more of a bully -- it wears away at your sanity year by year. I will never live in Cedar Rapids.

The stink subsides. Down at the river, I am left with the silver I saw on the green grass, now on the water, as it twinkles along its way. I can’t spend this silver, but I can call myself rich for being here to see it.

I leave you with that.