Friday, May 15, 2009

Safe

Ancestor Bundle/Micron and watercolor
We emptied her attic, basement, upstairs rooms,
cubbies behind bookcases.
Linen closet, white-painted
shelves, the medicine cabinet,
neatly labeled under-bed storage cases,
great hat boxes, the hall closet, pop beads,
empty hangers, cards and thank you notes.
.
Unfinished laundry, curled carbon paper,
family photos labeled and unlabeled,
gifts from strangers, her
button box, sheet music. Beneath basement stairs his
shoe polish, black, brown, blood of ox.
Awards and plaques, the ice cream salt.

Taking two years to sort with trowel and sifter,
Every last item designated, consigned, presented, donated,
divided, burned, recycled, restored,

sold, traded, flushed, shredded, consumed.

Until left with only one remaining task:
The Safe.

Hulking on back porch, door ajar
empty but still declaring “this safe is not locked,"
“It contains no valuables,” printed on index card.
And so it sat. My brother and I, facing it off, announced
that Matt Walker of his eponymous auto repair
would move the thing. We asked.

And three months passed.

He was unmoved, it was unmoved.

Until, July. Eyed, measured, wrestled, lifted, hoisted,
hooked, backed and pulled
that dark mass dangling on his wrecker
out through detached back door,
down painted concrete steps
over stones and slowly through the
street to that garage
where we had set pallet of bricks to hold
its considerable weight. And we were done.
Except for ruts behind their house that stretched
from down-spout to hill where pear tree
used to be, for hooking hinges on peeling-paint
door, and for erasing one large unpainted square
shimmering, shimmering on floor of that finally
irrevocably and undeniably empty back porch.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Local residents launch war on shade

In an move that may spark nationwide interest, residents of this west Kentucky town believe they can-- once and for all --completely rid the town of shade. Beginning in early March, citizens of Clinton, Kentucky launched a grassroots effort to confiscate and systematically destroy all visible tree branches.

J.K. “Rexie” Ross, Clinton cannonizer, is among those voicing support for the effort. “They were everywhere” he said. “You couldn’t see the sky for those things.”

When asked about the origin of the project, most community leaders were stumped.“The idea came from Clinton’s radical core,” one citizen admitted. “But now splinter groups have formed in Fulgham and Water Valley." Oakton has one of the largest limb nullification projects in the area. For weeks at the onset of the project residents worked day and night, abandoning their jobs and rejecting computer and television as “distracting.” Most even resisted cell phone use.

“It’s impossible to log all the hours we’ve given to this effort,” one worker commented. An elderly lady added, "I feel like I've been pulled through a knot hole backwards."

There has been opposition, though largely hollow. One homeowner was seen lumbering aimlessly in his orchard seeking shade. Neighbors believe he has a deeply rooted problem. "He's an indolent sort, certainly not executive timber," one noted.

In this case and others like it, the state department of deforestation takes up the slack, attacking offending limbs with their own bucket trucks and chain saws. The workers are in high spirits. “No hangers in this town,” one barked. “We’ve stripped the place clean.”

With trucks running 24 hours a day much of the tree refuse has been relocated south of town. Once only the size of QE II, the growing wood pile is now roughly the length of Delaware. Ex-zetta Bencini, local journalist, said Clinton residents will bend but never break. “We won’t stop until every branch is gone, ” she said. “This town knows how to stick to it.”