Some Old Bird

I’m in 1.1 of boulderpavement, a new on-line journal put together by Steven Ross Smith.

For the traveller viewing Hillsdale from across the sea, admitting that Hillsdale is far from the sea, new is a word that carries a lot of tailfeathers, as we peacock-watchers like to say. In Hillsdale, the traveller had asserted that the trees tell the story, remembering the seedlings he and dozens of other children carried home from school to plant in their brand new yards 50 years ago, now part of the canopy sixty or more feet above Hillsdale’s leafy, Leaf-fanned avenues, not to mention the stump culture, testament to trees past mature, to species tried and abandoned. Or, pavement tells the story, the traveller’s reading of what once was flat and shiny (in summer), now humped and patched, pitted and potted until little Newlands avenue, for example, becomes, year-round, an off-road experience on-road. Whatever stories of time and change the traveller might imagine from such observations, including correspondences to his own body, also a tad past mature, derive from the passage of fewer than sixty years.

The traveller muses in this manner while sipping tea in the shadow of a castle 700 years old, built on the remains of Islamic and Roman settlements another thousand years old.