A SLOW NEWS DAY FOREVER

A hot slow summer's day, languid and calm.

A Slow News Forever.

    Post Christmas in suburbia, lazy daydreaming of another world. Hopelessly trying to escape to another land. Pressing her anonymous face against the smooth cool window, as the suburb trails by in heated days.

       

   Lone dogs stroll past, busy at nothing, as the roses sag, the birds commence gathering in the slumbering afternoon. In her reverie, the woman winds back the years. Vignettes fade through her dozing. Early childhood mud pie making in the heat of the father's vegetable patch. She recalls the fruit trees' bounty, the taste of the sun-ripened apricots, full of nectar.

 

        She reminisces swimming in the local river, no indoor chlorinated floaties here. "Don't come back if you drown!" her father says, as he snoozes at the sunny river edge. Another place, another time. Same little old town, same people at the same school, partying and marrying, reproducing and divorcing same sort of people. Generations who wing around the world, always returning, never far away. Faces appear, no names, as they meet and greet in the same old stores. Nothing happens, nothing changes.

       'Way back when ', she escaped on the train. Came back home on the 5:15. Adventure by rail to the big city, to study, to learn to dream, to love learning, to be learned.

        An interesting life, too long to mention, all a dim grey maze of chances, mistakes, and love. She lingers on the broken wheels of life, returning to her small town, never faraway, her childhood home.

 

      Summer rolls on, the world turns, the passers-by pass by, meandering and languid. Time slows, she sits. Hearing

Einstein's voice within her, "Nothing happens until something moves."

           A slow news day, forever.

          "

Author's Note

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