hearth

There’s a mound of a park out on a major US highway. Clouded with mosquitos along the walk of its bay, so one hears the mufflers a few kilometers away.

Yet it’s pretty enough to drown out the noise. The entrance sports a butterfly garden, along with a bunch of car-dwellers with scattered papers in their passenger, crooked XP laptop in their reclined driver.

As one ventures deeper into the sprawly sort of potato fry enclosure, so you rise and rise. More jagged layers of concrete parking lots, fanned out between the shaded tree overview. A deep leaf slope behind guard rail — a bay poking out between canopies.

With enough driving one gets into this — how to say — a “cleared section” sort of feeling. Like a burial site, except instead of gravestones there are more parking spots. And the parking spots follow an Aztec sort of layout, each layer a bump up from the last. Each jut of parking lot wall furnished with carvings — carvings of things that seemed like faces, or waves, or wind from long ago.

There are only two layers to this temple burial grounds. A curled road-end to link, the same as an airport car tower. Except there’s this foreboding tree to greet you as you ascend for the last time. Wide steps of slab, speckled beige and peach.

Well, the last time in the car. There’s one flight of stairs left. A measly five-stepper, maybe seven.

With the last step so the bay greets again, only with such an expansive meadow between. High enough to where a breeze keeps itself perpetual but gentle.

Surveying the area you may discover the playground to the far-right end of the meadow from those stairs. All empty. No trees. Nothing but grass and faint shadows of children prior, children past.

It was the type of place you wouldn’t be surprised your heart stopped beating. it was the type of place you wouldn’t mind spending moments for the time being. There’s only one building, and it’s a bathroom with a Candy land curled pathway.

Sauntering down the meadow slope from the seven-stepper stair, it’s a mild decline — an isolated sort of divine pocket of frilly yellow lime with sprinkles of scorched earth — dry and forgotten.

It’s the place to encapsulate what it means to no longer speak. To no longer know of bonfires, of classroom shuffles to corporate car jams. So hollowed that the hollow bursts within you.

Just this meadow, a breeze, and a glimpse of eternity, however long you’ll want to separate yourself from it.

It may not be a burial grounds, but it seems to imprison something. Walking back to the car you may find yourself feeling observed. And with a few more curls down you’ll pass the tree once more.

The meadow and tree maybe looks at us with pity, or benign indifference — perhaps they already view us from a thousand years since.

I guess in some way we’re already dust in the wind.