It is beautiful here.

I will not qualify that by saying that wherever you live is beautiful once you really get to know it, once you are a part of it, and have something invested in believing that it is a place you want to be. I will just say that when I go outside at night I feel good about things. There are no lights around our house. Two slivers that peek through the curtains in our foyer shine and lay out across the yard. They look like two white ghost tire tracks. A city block away there is a yellow streetlight that lights up the construction sight of a house at the bend of our road. They've been slowly converting a shack into a respectable house with a carport and large front porch. I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to have built a new house in the first place. It's like building a bmw from a golf cart. The construction site is all mud and big white trucks. This streetlamp, the only one I can see, also shines on the trailer that is our only sight neighbor. If you look beyond that, beyond his huge white truck, beyond his fence to hold in goats, beyond his son's shotgun leaning against the aluminum on his house, you'd see the highway. You can sit and watch headlights go by in the distance at night, always perpendicular to your sight like they are running across your computer screen. It is probably a straight mile away but you can hear the trucks because there is nothing to come between you and the sound here.

You can look west across our backyard. The sun sets over Cleveland everyday, getting it's light confused with that glow that comes from cities. After the sun is finished, there's still a yellow red haze that points towards the buildings that hold the life of the town. If you look north from here, there is nothing but nothing. The fields are broken up by a treeline probably 3 miles away. From somewhere a light blinks at the power station. Someone said to me once that running cross country is horrible here because things that you see in the distance, that you run toward, keep on staying in the distance because you can see until the earth curves away here.

At night, if I were trying to fall in love with someone, I would only take them to my house. The tree in our front yard has lost it's leaves and if you'd look at it with the stars shining through, the whole scene black and navy and white, it'd make you say something. We do have a treehouse that you can lay in. If you lay across the boards and look down you can feel the weight of gravity pulling you across them, and it seems like you are hanging there defying everything. Around behind our treeline, past all the remnents of our property is a huge tractor tire that I sit on barefoot. I've thought of painting there but the view is not so beautiful. It's just that it makes me calm to see my home stretch out like that. It doesn't change, and it isn't violent. I could walk for miles in it. Here is what loving this place (or anything) is basically about: It is only because this place has tamed me. There is nothing special about it except that it is mine. The things about it will be beautiful to me whether they have any intrinsic beauty or not. And this is why ideal beauty does not exist.

I've thought that one day I would take someone here and they would understand, that I would be tamed, but that hasn't happened, and now I don't expect it ever will.