November 17th, 2016 Fraud in the Rocks

​​On the recent election:
​I try t​o be clear. What is clear? It runs from me like the crystal streams and collected pools of my childhood. In Tennessee on a hot summer road trip before air-conditioned cars, my brothers and I were always on the lookout for natural swimmin’ holes. One day it was, go down that road, Dad, shrieking because we had seen a patch of blue in the rocks. He pulled to the shoulder, grumbling, mother sweating, and we all looked down. It was a deep strip mining pool, and the color of it was not natural, but some unknown spectrum of ice green and smarmy toilet bowl blue. Before we saw the sign, danger, no swimming, toxic, we knew that offending color was false. I was very young, eight maybe, and a lasting sadness bloomed in me that such a fraudulent thing in the natural rocks could entice us. It is how I feel today. ​