PrairyErth by William Least Heat-Moon

Author:William Least Heat-Moon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In Kit Form:

The Cottonwood Chapter

Now: you are dreaming, walking in your dream, here in the hills, alone. If you continue you will find what I have hidden for you, if you want it. The time is October, and you are far south in the quadrangle, dreamwalking up to a crossroads, and you see the big and isolated cottonwood tree; the massive bole you cannot encompass even halfway around with your arms (its grandness keeps it from ungainliness), its bark furrowed deeply as if plowed, the whole tree stubbed down by the wind, the branches thick as trunks of lesser trees, the lower ones curving nearly to the earth; the leaves, toothed spades, little mirrors throwing shimmered light, dangle so brightly yellow at sunrise and sunset that you can believe you never really saw true yellowness before, not even in ingots hot from the furnace: it’s as if the leaves have used the summer to leach color from the sun, and now, as the days cool, they release their pent heat through their yellow light. Take a book and sit beneath the tree and read and see the pages turn golden as if they too receive the old and sponged-up solar extravagance. The cottonwood grows just beyond the crossroads in a damp draw, and you will find here the dream-kit I have left you, and in it the pieces I’ve gathered but not assembled, because they are to be yours, things for you to put your imprint on, but there are no directions. All I want is to show you some of what is in a name, to cut it open to reveal how meaning accumulates like sap rings in a tree trunk, each year deepening the name, thickening it.

The writer writes, but there is no real book until the reader enters a shared dreamtime and makes the connections. So: start in the middle and read outward, start at the end and read upward; it is yours to make: design, whittle, cut, snip, tie, glue, trim, rasp, paint, grow vexed, cuss, and pitch it across the room (we will then share one more thing): it is yours to show how the pieces can fit together, perhaps even to demonstrate how the job should be done:

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