BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… DARK TOWN SNOW. The painting hangs in the gallery, testament to a thousand small towns, a thousand Americas across the winter, a thousand winter nights. The weathered, lonely red bricks of an easily overlooked downtown, the black of the sky, white snow piled on old wooden steps. Unseen street lamp illuminates the…
BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… RIVERS AND LIGHT. The shadows of leaves dance on my living room wall, end of another day, end of another hot summer day. Science tells us, obviously, the earth’s rotation changes our perspective on the sun, just another star in just another galaxy of stars. Just the same, my sun sets, marking…
BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… BIG TRUCKS AND FARMERS ALL. Solstice sunset, longest, darkest night of the year, and the big rigs on the big road are lit like Christmas trees in the cold. Orange and red and yellow lights frame big rectangles of American freight racing at 80 miles per hour, mile after long Missouri mile,…
Red Oak II by Joshua Heston [JASPER COUNTY, MISSOURI] — A sharp wind whistles across the rolling Missouri plains east of Carthage. Here, less than a mile north of famed Route 66, is Red Oak II, a community that isn’t a town, but a tourist attraction that is a homey neighborhood of museum-esque eccentricity. The…