Natural Takeover of Small Things

The Truth About Small Towns

6 The Truth About Small Towns Mistral was dead wrong about small towns. She must’ve been referring only to that cathedral in Santiago, Chile, or to her own mother’s habit of saving crippled pigeons trembling near a marble fountain. For had she seen the way Tejano mothers clutch cut garden hoses in east Orange Cove, or how the blackbirds taunt the weeping wires down from telephone posts at dawn, she might have put things differently— She might have instead wrote, small towns are caught up in a lust for domination. Someone builds a silo, someone tears it down. Someone impregnates the child, another leaves it in the bed of a truck for someone they never met. Even the train tracks end here, and serve no purpose, except to house a single jackrabbit, content on procreating with its shadow. There certainly would have been no mention of lullabies after witnessing how wheat, felled by a freeze, still manages to whisper abhorrently about its offspring. ...