BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… THE SHIRT ON THE SINK. I stumble to the bathroom and pick up my olive green “Freedom Is Not Free” t-shirt from the sink where it has been lying crumpled for the past three days. The shirt is wrinkled but that doesn’t matter. The dogs certainly won’t care as I take them on their first walk in three days. Chest colds are no laughing matter anymore but the fever broke last night somewhere between a YouTube commentary on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Red Baron cheese pizza and it is nice to not be dizzy anymore.
Outside, the spring storms had raged. I watched the radar grimly, anticipating the social media reports of tornadoes and floods and loss. The cities along the Ohio River began closing their flood gates one by one, like dominoes. A friend’s shaky nighttime video from the big river came through, massive lightning strike briefly illuminating barges and rain-drenched hills beyond. Even on a small screen, the captured moment was awe-inspiring. The grandness of a springtime world come alive in fitful rage is indescribable, solace found in the knowledge this is not the first time, nor will it be the last.
Downtime, while unwelcome, can be helpful, even as I doom scrolled to take my mind off the fever and ache. A screenshot of the Mississippi River watershed gets saved for later, along with explanatory text. We consider the origin of the Mississippi River to be a single point in Minnesota but the complicated reality is enlightening. There is no single point of origin to the river, but instead thousands of points, tiny creeks and streams across North America. The watershed map looks like a spreading tree with branches reaching across my Midwest. My mind turns back to the stream I would splash through as a child in Illinois — a stream that formed in the front yard only when it rained — and then to the farm in Iowa where the swallows built their nests in a crumbling bluff that overlooked the creek, a creek in which a beaver once floated by with a cottonwood leaf on his head as though he were wearing a hat.
Our modern mind has set itself on the idea of a single character, a single hero, a single protagonist, and we are all vying for that space of fame and meaning and glory for better or for ill. Such is celebrity in all its airbrushed and Photoshopped glory. Important people, single point of meaning, place signpost here, and pay appropriate respect — but nature doesn’t really work like that. How much more comforting to know there is not a single character, a single origin to the river of life, but instead thousands, each special to their own ecosystems even if never renowned? A grandfather’s advice, a grandmother’s prayers, a father’s sacrifice, a brother’s hug, unknown to the world, never in the headlines. Those things count.
Two nights ago I found a documentary on the Weep House, perhaps the latest “cursed house” of internet infamy. The paranormal investigation was unsettling, awash with stories of suicide, disappearance, and abuse, all near the banks of Indiana’s Wabash River. I once dreamed of growing up and moving far away to a place with beaches and palm trees and warm weather year-around. Ironic I would instead find my own small place in the world writing of the strength of the mountain peoples and the blue collar here in the middle of America. There is overlooked profundity here, a story ever worthy of the telling. Small and forgotten Midwestern towns hold a special place in my heart, the houses’ windows dark, like eyes that have seen too much.
More headlines, more commentary, more shouting, more tragedy. Every new panic is a reminder we have short memories indeed. Our personal agency has been outsourced to others. Personal communities, our own ecosystems, have been bankrupted for the benefit of cheap goods and cheaper ideas. Deep down, we know we weren’t meant to live such lives, forever in vicarious outrage. Anxiety results. Remembering that nostalgia is mostly a mirage as life has always been hard is a strange balm. And greatness rises not in grand and sweeping indignation but in the homespun actions that knit our people together. Agency is claimed from within, created from inside our communities, and from a realization that we are never as important as we imagine ourselves — and yet are likely far more important to those around us than we could possibly imagine.
I stumble out of the bathroom, having tugged on my wrinkled t-shirt and worn jeans and boots. The dogs are preemptively whining, excited for their walk. I pause in time and space, moment of mortality hitting hard, uncharacteristic as I am usually healthy and mostly young yet —
Someday, I will leave my shirt crumpled in the bathroom for the last time, never to pick it up again. Someday, all the myriad debris of my life, the books, the music, the sentimental overload of art and life, even the half-emptied bag of Doritos on the table, will exist alone and dark and cold, the life that imbued it all with meaning gone. The thought is sobering, a reminder that I make the most of what I have, not just in career accomplishment, but in compassion and care, before others are left sifting through my homespun debris of this thing we call life.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2025
