july 2, 2017. alter.

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Hours of rolling through rural New England countryside. Overgrown field after disused barn after collapsed cemetery, all silent in summer still air.  Power lines crackle and zing overhead.   The barn and the dirt below are slowly becoming more like each other.

Perhaps a deep placid spell has fallen over this place.  Its possessions have been suspended in an blurry past – that old shed, the old barn, the old jeep.  The spell works into us in the white noise of tires on asphalt, bird calls, the sound of crickets in the afternoon at the edge of the woods – woods that deepen down to dark well before sundown, the heavy leaves concealing something pre-colonial and mythic just beyond where the sun stops.

And here, something built and bewitched rises in the grass…

Sons of the Silent Age

Re-reading Madame Bovary:

They had the pale, very white skin that goes so well with the diaphanous tints of porcelain, the luster of satin, the patina of old wood, and is kept flawless by simple, exquisite fare.”

-Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary