Wind howling,
Lightning arcing,
Rain falls in great painful sheets,
With thunder booming like the yells of some great giant,
Woken from his eternal sleep.

I wonder what it feels like,
To be struck by one of those voluminous bolts,
To be ignited by plasma who's degrees are in the thousands,
To be burned out to the core.

Sitting on the porch,
Drawing from an ice cold bottle,
I think back to my childhood,
Tyler Childers yodeling into this pre-summer air,
I'm drawn back to when I was six...

My father's father babysitting me,
Taking me for a walk through his garden,
Filled with carrots, tomatoes, and onions
Which he tended to every day,
I remember asking him what it meant to be a hard worker.

He paused to look at me,
In that way he would,
His face seeming to scrunch in on itself,
And after a moment,
As it always would,
Would return to it's natural state.

He told me to wait there,
And was gone but a minute or two,
He came back with a bucket and some trowels,
And had us digging up the veggies he grew.

It felt like hours to my children's mind,
But was probably only a minute or two,
The bucket was filled,
He paused in his labors,
And told me to give him my hand.

His hand dwarfed my own,
Dispite it being ravaged and shrunken with age,
He held my hand up for inspection,
And with a slight grin,
Turned to show me what he saw.

It didn't appear to be anything to me,
Just some dirt and grit on my hand,
Until he explained with wise words,
"A hard worker ends his day with dirt under his fingernails, Louie, that's all that needs to be seen",
And with a nod,
We went inside,
To wash up for chili and franks.

I never knew that he was sick.

Fast forward a couple of years,
And I'm playing in the creek of my childhood home,
Looking for snakes,
And enjoying the day,
My mother came out,
Looking upset,
And called me in,
That we were going to go see Grandpa,
And with that my heart soared.

It didn't soar long.

He looked so small,
In that sterile hospice bed,
But as children often are,
I was oblivious to the situation,
And ran up to his bed.

He was so weary looking back,
Ravaged by cancer and time,
His face a roadmap of hardships,
Of trials sustained through the years,
But not seeing this then I ran up to him,
I smiled and said,
"I'm a hard worker Grandpa, just like you said!"

Adorning the undersides if my nails,
Black from creek mud and grime,
Some life returned to his dying eyes,
And dispite not being able to speak,
It didn't matter,
No words needed to be said.

It was the last time I saw him,
So long ago it seems,
But that old man taught me a good lesson,
That I won't ever forget.

Being brought back to the present,
Bone tired after a 12 hour shift,
I look at my hands and grin,
Grin at the carbon encrusted nails and oil stained creases.

The signs of a hardworking man.

Mandolin plinking from a tiny speaker,
McKnight doing his damndest to make my knee bounce,
Bringing tunes that remind me of Appalachian summers,
Transporting me to those mountains and hills.

Summer barbeques with Carolina gold slopped into mashed taters,
Sweet corn smothered in butter,
Gentle breezes and acoustic guitars,
Grilling meat and beer in ice-filled coolers,
Giggling young'uns and laughter of their parents,
Such vivid memories of the oldest generations,
Telling of the time their homesteads received electricity.

These wise elders regaled us with oddities and anecdotes,
Nuggets of delivered knowledge wrapped in allegory and stories,
Their amusement evident in their not-as-bright eyes,
As they watch us trying to suss out true blue kernels of wisdom from the tall tales.

Family friends that are loved just as strongly as my own parents,
Friends they grew up with,
From WAY back in the day,
Telling each other the same tale for the millionth time,
And yet laughing uproariously like it was the first time.

These are days that have been in the past,
And snapshots of days in the future,
When supper in summer Appalachia happens once again,
Great nostalgia and anticipation wrapped up in a great ball of joy,
South of the Ohio Border.

Mournful tunes,
Sorrowful news,
There is a savage grace at work in one who can sink below the lowest depths of hell and come back up with such a cautionary diamond,
Simmering rage boiling beneath calm water surfaces,
Dealing with their own past perdition in stride.

Disconnection and disassociation,
From old jobs, old apartments, and houses.
Like I'm a ghost who'd fragmented into so many pieces and places,
Who's hauntings connect me to these people and locations.

Chains that bind one another in an eternal embrace of love and despising,
Tired bones in a youthful frame,
Disjointed memories and discombobulated thoughts,
In grey mush contained by a dome,
Perpetuating thoughts along neural highways and electrical connections,
Riding a lattice-work of joints and tendons,
Bringing a lumbering machine of flesh and carbon,
Through this odd and enthralling plain.

12 jobs,
9 cars,
78 Summers,
5 partners,
Such odd yet specific numbers.

Grains of sand through an aperture,
Tick tick tick goes the pocket watch,
Tock tock tock goes the grandfather clock,
Bing **** goes the church tower,
Cookoo goes the antiquated clock.

Seconds, minutes, hours, days.
Glimpses, figments, memories, experiences.

Snippets, songs, albums, discographies.
EP, LP, Concepts, compilations.

Take a breath and see what you can,
For here one minute,
Gone the next,
For the Law of Averages is the way things have always gone,
And the way it's always went.

Levon Helm haunts my ears this morning,
As I drive up 127 with the top down,
Passing by Montezuma,
So I can see a most peculiar sight.

There's a town in an Ohio,
Where time seems to have been frozen,
A singular main street of tall buildings,
Surrounded by fields of corn and soy,
Where I have only seen blue skies and sunshine.

Like Springsteen's song the band is covering,
It seems to be a town of perpendicular and parallels,
Booming business amidst rust belt squalor,
A mixture of broken souls of the old,
Sprinkled throughout the shining and smiling faces of the young,
Looking forward to escaping?
Or maybe content in their little slice of 80's America?

There is a lake that is the namesake of the town,
Or maybe it's the other way around?
That borders this town on it's eastern side,
And for long I have always wished to just take a day and sit upon it's shore,
To take a day and just breath.

It was honestly a mistake that first brought me through this sleepy town,
All those years ago,
Through this odd land surrounded by forests of windmills,
That stretch to the horizon like fields full of planted and forgotten giant's pinwheels,
That took me from Detroit to Cincinnati by way of the Indiana border,
And arriving here felt like a surreal dream.

Just a silly 18 year old,
How was I to understand the uniqueness of this place I'd stumbled upon?
But going back up a year later,
A calling I felt deep in my bones,
To see if it was more than a dream,
So return I did,
And to my surprise it still remained,
This analogue paradox in such a digital age.

10 years later,
And it is all the same,
As if the world outside doesn't matter,
And perhaps it never would.

I pass through slowly,
Waving back at the residents that throw up a hand in greeting,
Such a antiquated greeting that still kept alive in this time capsule town,
And as I pass through it's district,
As quickly as I came,
A warmth remains,
Some nostalgic sensation for something I have barely experienced as a kid,
Or perhaps only imagined I did.