Suburbs

The suburbs of Salt Lake freak me out. I imagine how they came to be founded as splinter sects in the dull wilderness: a man or brothers or cousins with many wives in the middle of nowhere, where there existed only the political structure of family. Not an offshoot of cultural richness or even somebody’s Walden, but a churlish packing off to some wasteland in order to exert more power over the land, the women. I imagine the women, digging and sweating and birthing in their flour-sack dresses with raw hands. I think of young girls with hair long enough for a prince to climb, destined to marry some old man not of their choosing, to bear children, yet never to have sweethearts of their own. And now the places are mazes of great, airy houses made of inexpensive materials, dotted every couple of blocks with eerily identical ward houses. There are signs that say “Children at play,” but mostly the houses are silent edifices. These communities grow exponentially and are creeping out of the valleys and up the mountainsides.

Fresh Start

Today was the first Salt Lake farmer's market of the growing season. Veg was scant, but I did pick up some Swiss chard and baby beets. We listened to Tolchock Trio play (kind of Velvetundergroundy and actually a sextet), and it felt good to lie on my back on the cool grass and feel sort of warm and cold at the same time. It threatened rain pretty much all day, but the market was crowded. Part of why it felt so good to lie down was that I didn't have to look at the other people, and I could stop thinking about looking a certain way or the way they were looking. Don't get me wrong- everybody looked great. It's just that sometimes you don't want to look. Sometimes I think the steady decline of my eyesight is a subconcious wish that I have to just smell and feel more, and not have to look so much.