The Rock & Sand Club Loop: Take Care of This Place

A little place, now, of mud and water, a seasonal compositional transformation. Puddles and wallows tantalize, encourage splashing, but sliding in slippery goop discourages the young girl, loosing momentum, stopping with foot down and wet, while the older brother taunts to "keep pedaling." Dad watches until the last, willing the daughter to make it on her own. I watch from behind, trapped by the narrow trace, not wanting to tempt the deeper, messier passage around. As do I, so too does time wait, enough to notice red-orange stalks rising straight from ground above, as much a contrast to winter brown as summers dusty loop is to winters wet one.

A message scrawled by passer-by, in congealed mud, over-ridden by tired tracks. But time allows a turn-about to see and read and ponder what. "Take Care of this Place." I wonder at the scope of the authors' thought, the meaning of "place." Was it limited, inclusive to this small basin in a larger drainage system? confined by barriers of man-made rock on one side and earthen stone on the other. Or was place more broad in scope, this earth our home.