Spring 2021 Contest Winner
Perennial
It’s early March, and the county is thawing. Piles of dirty, slushy snow sit on street corners and melt into puddles in the driveway, but the ice is long gone. Folks return their plows to their backyards. The roads are damp, but clear. No one has any excuse to miss work or school, so they don’t, and everyone goes back to our usual routine in which we all complain about the heavy storms, then forget they ever came until the following winter.
I’m waiting for spring like a drowning man waits to reach the surface of the water to gasp for breath. This town isn’t any more welcoming when it’s warm, but the breeze in my hair keeps drawing my attention toward the horizon, reminding me there’s more beyond the county limits.
There’s more than just this.
Southern hospitality is charming. Muddy boots and hand-me-down flannels feel like home. I pass by French’s Mill, amazed that it still stands. All boarded windows and peeling shingles, the letters on the sign long faded and chipped away, I’m comforted by its dusty, weathered promise of permanence and the proof that some things can withstand the test of time.
But withstand as it might, the Mill will inevitably just sit there and rot. I know it, and whoever owns it knows it. Maybe they find comfort in knowing the Earth here keeps tabs, that it’ll remember every building raised on its soil. Maybe they see that as commemoration. I see it as a memorial.
The mountains, old as the Earth, stare down at me in dismay. Why leave, they ask, when we’ve protected you so?
And it’s true that they’ve shielded me all my life, showed me how to stand tall and be immovable — but just as they keep tornado winds away, they guard memories like sentinels. No grief ever escapes the valley.
Leaves fall with each child taken by their own hand. A river of addiction surged into town years ago, and we’ve been wading in the flood ever since. Churches collect tithes to build higher steeples and visit state parks, while queer youth search for compassion like loose change. And I’m left to wonder how, in a place so small that everyone knows me, I can feel so completely and utterly alone.
The town grows fractionally and the buildings age, but this trauma, this pain, is a perpetual winter, and I can’t keep waiting for spring.
