Carry Us All

After a few miles, Kevin pulled over and got out his map, not from uncertainty of where he was or where he was going, he just liked to see what it looked like on paper. He had a reasonably good sense of direction, but sometimes the small back roads could seem like they were folding in on themselves, giving him the uneasy feeling he was driving around in circles. He refolded the map to the area he knew himself to be in and searched about with his finger, as if the map were printed in Braille. It was probably the architect in him that preferred the printed map over the GPS on his phone. The detail and carefully laid out lines were like the plans and specs for a building. The exactness of it brought him comfort and a momentary feeling of control.

He looked up to a broad expanse of cornfields. Overhead, huge white clouds gracefully swept through a crystal blue sky. The sky out here always seemed so much bigger than in the city. There was nothing to obscure the sightline from one horizon to the other. Now and then a silo might rise up above the ocean of cornfields, like a lighthouse on a rocky shoreline, but otherwise there was just sky.

Kevin had often thought the mountains, where he and his parents had vacationed every summer, would always be his favorite place, or perhaps near the seashore where he had grown up. But the more time he had spent in the Midwest, driving down small back roads, the more he had come to love this place. At first, everything had seemed flat and monotonous, but he had come to appreciate the subtleties of the landscape and could discern its gently rolling curves. It wasn’t flat at all. It disguised itself. It gave up its quiet beauty a little at a time, season by season.

And the colors. It may have seemed to the newcomer all green in the summer, nothing but dead brown in the fall. But a person looking closely, with wonder, would soon be rewarded with a dozen shades of green and handfuls of brown hues. And then the sun. When it rose or set, the sky could explode with colors barely imaginable.

The thoughts of colors made Kevin's heart turn to his wife, the artist in her. He knew she would see all the colors in this landscape in an instant. He knew he could bring her out here, show her all this, and she would love it, too. But he also knew her heart would forever remain near the ocean she loved. That’s where she would always want her home to be. But she could paint all this, he thought, after seeing it only once. She could bring it all back to life on canvas with perfectly placed brushstrokes. And she would bring each painting to him, a piece of herself, all blended and folded into each work of art, and he would love every single one.

He sat up straighter and realized he had been looking down the road, far into the distance, not really seeing anything in front of him with his eyes, and only seeing home in his mind.

He pulled out onto the road. Home was south and he was headed north. He felt a twinge of pain at this, but it was quickly cushioned by the thought of his prize in the back of the truck and the eagerness he felt at what he hoped to find at his next destination.

A few hours later, a sign came into view.

Welcome to Hayes, it read, in bold stylized lettering.

Beneath that, in smaller letters: Your City of Progress.

A few yards further on, a smaller sign in black and white. A sign with quiet confidence.

It simply read: Hayes, population: 10,219.