VIRGINIA
By Kathryn Jacobson
She has an old type of beauty.
I’m not quite sure why she feels that way; old. I suppose God put the dirt here at the same
time he put the dirt everywhere else. It’s her wooden windmills and rusted silos.
Tall trees and thick, rugged undergrowth. It’s an overgrown lawn, even though I mowed last week.
Burgeoning rivers and smoothed boulders, slick with algae.
In the desert, there are ruins, preserved in the dry dust. Here, ruins are swallowed by the earth;
mildew and creeping vines consuming quickly all that is left abandoned.
Yet it feels older here than there.
Perhaps it is her history. A mind’s eye envisions muskets and knapsacks resting on tired shoulders, loosely fitted with hand-sewn shirts. They walked here, but when? I can’t see the old roads. Was it yesterday?
No, perhaps she isn’t old. Perhaps she is ageless. I can’t see the time left in solid tangible memory, but I can feel it, as a traipsing ghost, mingling with the Shenandoah mists.
Ageless and present, like I am the old one, pondering as the seasons pass and the sap runs more
slowly in the red oak out front. Leaves fall, and laughter echoes away with the wind. Still, I’m
here, pondering her beauty. We’re one for a moment, she and I. Aging. Timeless. Changing.
Thankful.
