Wisconsin Gothic
you’ve lived in the same tiny town for 30 years. you were not old enough then to even remember living anywhere else. your neighbors still shake their heads sometimes and say “you’d understand if you were from around here.” if you were born here, they mean. “if you were one of us, you’d understand”
the brightest blue skies and most stunning colors happen in the fall. spring drags itself from freezing mud. october makes you wonder why there is celebration in dying, until march’s birth agony reminds you.
if you drive for long enough, there are woods. if you walk for long enough, there are woods. even the almost-endless cornfields find trees creeping in around the edges. “forests are precious islands in a sea of civilization” you hear, but some part of you thinks it must be the other way around.
strangers smile at you on the street, hold the door without a second thought, and insist that you cut ahead of them in line at the grocery store of course it’s no trouble at all. that graciousness fails to fill the vacuum of the empty bus seat between you. generosity does not quite soften the glassy-eyed anger that comes when you step over an invisible property line. i will part freely, they think, with that which only exists in the giving. but this space? this is mine
“bubbler,” your teacher says. “clicker,” your grandfather calls it. “crick,” an elderly fisherman explains. the gap between the language of the old and the young is wider than Lake Superior, and you wonder how long it will be until your words die out too.
Frank Lloyd Wright designed this building. Harry Houdini lived here. Joseph McCarthy attended this high school. we hold on to these legacies until they do not suit us. perhaps yours will be next.
