Nostalgia

NOSTALGIA by Jim Wayne Miller Like mist in the riverbottoms of their youth, a charcoal haze hangs over the subdivision where men sowed between two times, pacing dark corners of their deep back yards, yearn beyond the interstate's drone and whine to farms and open country. The small change in their pocket is a chain rattling. They sleep in air-conditioned rooms, apples falling through their frosty dreams of dinner bells and tinkling tracechains, of fathers plowing yelling gee and haw. Men sowed between two times awaken at traffic lights; they still hear axes ringing in dreamt woods; the smell of sweating horses curls with cigarette smoke and exhaust fumes. Reflected in plate glass, revolving doors, they catch baffling glances of themselves, strangers quadrupled on the walls of barber shops. But when they smell the velvet linings of old trunks, or look at dark tin-types of their forbears, the sepia faces dim in oval frames— their mothers' big wrists and crowblack hair plaited in two piles, their fathers' hands knotted as the roots of pasture oaksmen sowed between two times stand feeling the air turn old. For a moment they know themselves. They treasure old things plundered from their origins: a wooden chum, a coffee mill, a bowl and pitcher, a cutting from some flower that grew down home, a shrub uprooted, hauled home on a fender. They are themselves transplanted in black hearses back to Piney Grove, Payne's Chapel, Dix Creek, strangers to the soil of their beginnings. 77 ...