This is the place where birch trees meld into the striped horizon, our star-spangled eyes affixed to the notes of familiar song (a warm but wilted blanket, certain and civil around our necks). If shed together, all would be violet, the seeping blood of skies and veins, rigid warmth wrecked by the fall of day. This is America, violet and violent at once, small sterns fretting in the grease of a dirt-grass ocean. This is America, with plastic, compartmentalized lawn chairs, grandparents holding tight to sun-spotted hands, small gazebos that cannot coat, propel, protect from the rawest of rains. And deep beneath, seated in the inner rings of willows, pillowed pollen of communities, is some sort of love, tepid but true, tangled and torn, a pinched pirate sail not bowing to the storm.
While saviors, small and large, make their way into song, it is the blue-grass beat and belted words that stand out, the Dixie cups flowing with gingerale, the bug spray roaring back at beetles, the grease-sweat pizza boxes, bent brass belts, girls in hellish heals, babies with unimposing flags affixed to their still-spurting hands. At moments, these flags present themselves as worn appendages, grown from the wrists of the perfectly blonde children, curls that speak to a prairie already conquered and quit. They wave with joy, our small angels, quiet patriots, portable totems of federal fight. They hang upside down, run through the mediocre lawn, wretched with bloody knees, but bright eyed, plump with love. At no moment do they drop the flags, saying to their elders that they already know, that their fleshy legs, chipmunk cheeks are full not with summer berries and corn, but a pickled pride (one set within to season and burn from the very moment they were spit forth from their mothers’ watery wombs).
Our small Americans stand out in the crowd of grandmothers and grandfathers, fallen exhausted, too bright but beaten back by banking on pent-up possibility. They are grounded, give in to small dances, but delight mostly in the knowledge that they are here, home. I am delighted too, by the small waterfalls and lasting rainbows, stairs etched in mountains, reminding me of the world above red roofs, beckoning belonging. But this is America, I am told by the song and the crowd, the callouts to soldiers, the miniature flagged hands, the calluses of my urban upbringing somehow vacant from this smaller horizon. It takes vengeance on that other America—corrupt, cornered, cruel. Instead of the bed of horny hostilities lies an unhallowed dream, a gentle cooing of custom. Here no one bowls alone.
To which America is it that I belong? To which bright, banished, or bored nation? Can I deny, even with the stark cries inside, the swelling of my heart at this song, the certainty, the gracious grin in knowing I am here, home.
