The Long Song
Midwesterners literally watch the grass grow; can tell you the age of a stretch of asphalt by the hum of their tires.
The first KFC is located near Versailles, Kentucky
It’s no accident that some of our nation’s finest neurotics bought Prairie homes
The Prairie houses that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in the leafy Oak Park neighborhood of Chicago abide by a principle known as “compress and release.” The entrances and hallways of these homes are tight, cramped affairs, often with low ceilings and few windows. Wright’s goal was to compress the visitor so that, upon entering the living room, he could achieve an orgasmic release; your standard-issue field guide to psychoanalysis can tell you more (it's no accident some of our nation’s finest neurotics bought Prairie homes). Wright’s exteriors likewise played on the illusion of the prairie’s flatness. The profile of a Prairie house is almost two-dimensional, allowing it to blend into the Midwest's pencil-thin horizon. Actually step inside one of these houses, though, and you’ll discover a startling degree of depth.
Oak Park is also a favorite stomping ground of Ratboys, the Chicago-based indie-rock band …
Lithium
Meet the human price of ‘environmentally friendly’ electric car batteries
We’ll put a 500-foot-deep pit in your barn
45-day supply of bottled water if your well goes dry
Corporate mining giant Piedmont Lithium Inc. fails to meet Chad Brown’s definition of a good neighbor
In the summer of 1991, I was five years old and living in my grandfather’s American dream. Together with my mother, we spent the warm season in China Grove, a farm town 35 miles northeast of Charlotte, North Carolina, fixing up a white one-bedroom house with a red-brick porch and a Rose of Sharon bush out front. For my grandfather, it was a homecoming. He was raised in the old white farmhouse, and when he married my grandmother — “that little hillbilly,” he’d called her, before their love blossomed — he tried for a while to make a home with her in a back building she insulated with newspaper clippings advertising farm-supply stores and White Lily flour. When The Great War was over, he came back to her and their new daughter in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. For half a century, he dreamed about the fertile North Carolina soil. He always thought he’d make it back there for good, but he never did.
Besides …
Metamorphosis
A frog pond, filled with little frogs.
Frogs exist, whether we hear them or not.
Humans have to learn how to be human.
By the time this paper arrives in mailboxes and stores, people in some parts of the country may have begun to hear the chorus of frogs that assures us that spring is coming. But most places will still be deep in winter. The frogs know this, and they have nothing to say. Not yet.
Fast forward a few months, though, past the thawing of the ponds and the outpourings of lusty frog song, which can be deafening to those who wander close, and past the equally prolific extrusions of eggs out of frogs and into ponds — fast forward past all of that to the moment when those eggs have hatched.
Now. Imagine a pond in the middle of spring and the middle of the country teeming with life, roiling below the surface with little black jobs zipping to and fro. They seem to be made up of nothing but big heads and slim, powerful tails. Tadpoles. Pollywogs, if you will. Or, if you are in Honduras and trying to fit in, …
