Everywhere is sacred but if it’s not there’s always someplace else

Before you drop everything for the romance of the Pacific Crest Trail. Here’s a book about dirt and stink and calloused skin, of shriveled, freeze-dried food, of snow in summer, and things held dear dropped over steep ravines.

Tornados ravage the flatlands, turning love to dust but catch yourself and hold on tight before getting smug about it because the undulating hills you live on has folks so crammed up against each other that sickness gets passed among you faster than a game of telephone. 

Earthquakes or floods, droughts or out in the middle of nowhere and nobody helps, or stuck in a city and still nobody helps. 

There’s so many ways of staying where you are but the choice to leave could be so good that everybody who knows you says you’re a different person in a good way, not that they didn’t like you before. Or it could be shoes that refuse to fit and a tail between your legs. The roots you lay down are a sad sack sorry life but just as easy it could be brick by brick reaching all the way to heaven. 

Before you even think of moving to central New York where an intricate meandering fixer upper enough for a family of twenty awaits you for so little coin it’s ridiculous not to do it, read every single one of Joyce Carol Oates volumes including the ones that don’t have that place etched in its pages and I’m sorry she’s so prolific. Before you pack up your stuff, either by yourself or with hired hands, I’m going to ask you to do the same, no matter where you’re going, the only reason why is because I said so. 

If you read what I did in the last six weeks then you’ve seen Harlem, Norway, Germany, the inside of a mobile home, rooms in a hospital, a pig farm, an undisclosed location, another place so specific I started skimming just to get to the end of it. This won’t help you at all, not in any business-like way you’re maybe asking for, and I sense I’m so far off track as to have gone the other way and start making sense, but in either case  it bears mentioning anyway.

From the archives:
Best Case Scenario
The sun it did rise again
To mend