I grew up in the city, but as the years moved, we went out closer to the suburban line. The old man crossed it, came back, crossed it again. I went south. But when you went north, the land, pockmarked by closely built homes in the city, gave way to green rolling hills. Girls wore pale clothes with patterns and ridges that leapt up like the horses they rode on the weekends. They drove French station wagons and loved white wine spritzers. There stood the people we were supposed to be arm and arm with. These were the future, our future. But I could see something in them, something I didn’t have, something I sometimes ached for. I knew a good time when I saw one and those French cars were fun to bang around in.
Out in the hills went the horse races and the fox hunts and they rolled on that same line of demarcation, implication a suit of tweed armor you grew into. But, there were small rebellions, full of inner city dazzle, skulls, and neon leggings. Boone’s farm. Mentholated everything.
Where the streets and avenues and lanes gave way to state roads and routes, the lifestyle gave a little, too. Those stone houses, those winding drives, those creosote fence lines, they resonated with a slightly neurotic whim, a fancy for the past. So, I went back a few times. But the only things that radiated much meaning at all were the mud caked horses busting their asses to get over the fences.
by Hank Cherry
