The Wagon

When I was around 12 years old we lived at the far edge of a large city, where the houses on land lately-wrested from farms being pushed aside by housing developments. Across the street from our house was a cornfield still being farmed, and beyond those some rolling hills used for grazing cattle. Those cattle were owned by a nearby convent, where the nuns had made a living by leasing the land out. I'm not Catholic and never knew much about the place, but it had been there for years and its rural lifestyle was obviously being pressured by the growing city, though at that time the cows were still there.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time wandering those pasture fields and watched a couple of seasons come and go there, from the first spring grasses poking up though the last brown grasses waving in the winds and vanishing beneath the snows. At about the center of the place, under a large old cottonwood tree, sat an old wooden wagon with iron wheels, with a shaft for pulling it. The wagon had clearly been there for years; weeds and vines had grown up around it and small trees were growing through the wheels. The paint was long gone from the wood and all but totally flaked off the wheels. Fragments of pale brick, a few paving stones and some chunks of concrete suggested there may have been a barn or outbuilding near there, but nothing remained. The spot spoke of days gone forever.

I was haunted by that wagon and that spot. Not in a spectral sense, but because I sensed a story behind it. I knew that at some point years earlier someone must have deliberately drawn the wagon to that spot, and left it there. But I could never know the reasoning behind leaving it there. It seemed to have been in good shape. Perhaps it was replaced by new one, perhaps changes in farm mechanics made it outmoded. All I knew for sure was that it had waited year after patient year, season after endless season, to be used again. Until it reached the point of deterioration at which it could never be used again.

That wagon told -- tells -- me that I see everything around me, and in fact myself, is subject to that same uncertainty, the uncertainty that we can never know when we have reached the point of no more motion. I see that in the broad sense of life itself, but I also see it in smaller contexts of myself.

I feel it now, with my writing and the current chunk of writer's block that lies across my creative path. I like to think I will once again surmount it, or it will dissolve, or a bit of both, but deep down I sometimes wonder if this it. If, like that wagon, my creative mind has reached its spot in the fields and will simply rest there, slowly overgrown by the tendrils of time and wisps of memory, never to meaningfully move again, if my writer's mind is about to settle into the past.

Not an unreasonable (albeit not inevitable) consideration, when one has passed his promised "three-score and ten."