Conversations in Past
Kimball sat at the multi-layered kitchen table that was chipping rainbows under the strain of the hot moist tea cup. "Have you ever lived in other places?" Kimball asked, trying to cover the chipped away hole in the table. Picking at things: a nervous tick brought on by the discomfort of strange experiences. "Yes." Mr. Hallow smiled a smile beaming decades of pain and Mr. Hallow tended to the tea kettle on the pot-bellied wooden stove and whistled a tune unfamiliar to Kimball that sounded like birds in spring. "Yes, huh?" Kimball bit his lip, eyeing the room for windows that weren't filled with small pots of herbs and seedlings on the sills. Plants were everywhere actually. Filling comers, doorways, various pots and containers, broken pottery, saltshakers, coffee cups, and a very strange arrangement of ferns residing in a large strainer. “It doesn't need very much water, actually." Mr. Hallow said smiling, as if reading a question in Kimball 's mind rather bluntly. Kimball smiled awkwardly, scanning the room for empty windows again. "Actually, I've lived in many different places. From vast shiny cities to the dirty bleak allies of those shiny cities. From fast-pace jungle village life to small towns in Illinois where veteran's day is celebrated twice in one afternoon. You should have seen some of the places that I've lived. I've lived so many places in my lifetimes that I think... yes, I'm sure that I've lived in a few places at least twice. The landscape, climate, surfaces have changed, trees cut, brush burned, huts destroyed, buildings erected, streets laid, buildings wiped clean, more, shinier ones replacing those.”
Mr. Hallow paused and hummed to himself for a second, “My boy, the changes I've seen. Did you know that the only reasons that man has built one prettier, shinier taller building after another has really very little to do with vanity as we would believe? No, they build them to reflect the sky. Really, Kimball. Tell me, when was the last time you climbed a tree to get a closer look at the sky?" “Not since childhood I suppose," Kimball shrugged, half listening half, focused on the table that he was picking at. The different colors kept peeling away to another color, making Kimball wonder if this table had any sort of wooden root, or if it was just paint job over paint job, until nothing. "Exactly, my boy, exactly. It wasn't like that long ago," Mr. Hallow laughed at himself, “Grown adults would climb into the frees to catch a simple—if you’d call it even that—glance of the majestic sky. Bluer than the blue of your eyes. The wind would blow the clouds around you, mixing you into the landscape of the air. The crystals in the clouds would capture you in the moment, soaking you in white fluffy magic. If you think dew makes the shiniest of the flowers shine, think of what a cloud can do to soft skin. A person on the ground may mistake you for a wet bird resting for a moment on a branch. The sun, actually larger than the moon you see on the ground, and so much brighter from this level, frying you. Hell, you were so close to the sun that you'd have dried faster than you had gotten wet in the first place. But you'd still have that shine once the moisture was gone. A shine that let everyone know where you had been. Ahh, nothing else produced that luster. The closest thing to it is the glow of a woman with child, just hours before she gives birth. That is the closest thing to the sky shine.” Mr. Hallow paused again and sighed, “I don’t know. Maybe we were trying to see the sky better from there, up in the trees? But I think we were trying desperately to see God’s face as well. And, well, maybe we did some days. Not that it matters, you see. We've destroyed the trees. Sure, not all of them, but the larger ones, the ones that matter, the ones that came before any of us, the stairs to heaven if you will. And we began to replace them with buildings no taller than the ground we are stuck on now. This has gone on for years, but time catches up with us humans and soon we began to reinvent a number of ways to recapture the closeness of the sky. Building planes, balloons, objects of flights. And buildings of course. Bigger, stronger, taller buildings. Larger than life buildings to try and replace the trees. To try and pretend we didn’t create our own sadness, to try and reconnect with our past.” Mr. Hallow looked at Kimball directly, but almost through him, “But these are just man-made structures. Inferior in God’s eyes, but superior in our own. Foolish. So we keep build more and more obnoxious structures to place nature. Nature! To replace nature, Kimball. Can you imagine? Humans have such a rich struggle with defeat. Which helps create some of the best art, but also makes for the greatest funeral of fools.” Mr. Hallow sipped his tea and smiled again to himself, “But no matter, everything is realized in time. It always is.”
"Yeah, I see," Kimball sighed. The air was sweet from the tea and the light dim from the old hanging lamp hovering directly above the layered table. Kimball had come a long way to this visit it was seemingly becoming more dreadful than he had expected in the first place. "I hadn't really meant. Not really about all that. I had meant before here, in this… shack." Leaving the city was not difficult for Kimball. The long drive to the airport wasn't terrible. The plane ride, turbulence, and all, wasn't even that bad. He even enjoyed the trek through the mountains. The hair on the donkey was softer than he had remembered from his childhood and the ride much smoother than expected from a mountain trail. No, the difficult part was coming at all. Uncle Hollow was a real pain to be around. Kimball was a modern man, perplexed as well as disturbed by thought of any person trying to live by themselves in the Himalayas, living off the land, with only the shack he called a home, his mountain surroundings, and the teasing echoes of life. This visit was going to be long and trouble-some. Kimball could already tell from the first few minutes of his arrival that Uncle Hollow was not going to let this visit be a short one. Oh no, a man does not begin to discuss the cycle of life with in ten minutes of wiping your feet and mean to let you go in a few days. Which was just as well since he had made no plans to go anywhere concrete after this visit. Kimball looked at his Uncle with a small sigh, "I meant when you were younger, well, when you and mom were younger."
Mr. Hallow quit mid-sip of his tea and raised his one eyebrow, "Oh, I see," he smiled faintly wiped his already dry mouth. Kimball remembered thinking his Uncle had done that his whole life. Kimball continued to chip away at the table, searching for a core. Mr. Hallow was looking deep into his tea, fingering the rim of the cup, listening for a faint haunting hum. "So you want to talk about your mother." Mr. Hallow quickly looked up, deep into Kimball 's eyes and faded back to his steaming cup. "I see. Ok." “Yes. Thanks.” Kimball pressed on, wishing he hadn't asked. "But we don't have to talk about it now... not today." The day was already over, and the dew had already washed the mountain in thick fluids blankets. There was no longer any light coming from the mountains, the only light now coming from the pale lamps inside the room. The two men excused each other and went to their separate rooms for the night. The shack was faintly familiar to and yet not so; the kitchen lamp had been left on for the remainder of the night to help guide Kimball to anything necessary before morning.
The morning sun filtered into the house like the windows were fitted with wax paper. Mr. Hallow was boiling water in the kettle long before it even had a chance to cool from the conversation the night prior. Kimball was punchy and crooked, having slept so poorly on the knobby fold out sofa in the den. He sat again at the magical kitchen table made entirely of paint, it seemed and took in the overly green-on-green room around him in the daylight. Beyond the plants were coats of various green paint on the walls. Different hues of green, some dull, some bold clinging to the cheap boards. Even the wall behind the stove, which was greasy and peeling under the daily cooking stress, was gem green behind the tired olive green. Kimball picked at the fresh cornbread placed before him and licked a few crumbs from his fingernail. "No," Mr. Hallow said still facing the stove, tending to the steaming ham in a pot, "I don't use half the sugar you mother used to, sorry." Mr. Hallow turned around and smiled, "Our mother, your grandmother, never made it with any sugar when she taught us to make cornbread. Your mother loved sugar; sweet things so always added a wealth. Whereas I always split the difference with my cornbread adding very little. You can add some honey if you'd like." "That would be fine." Kimball nodded. He was ready. Obviously, the talk about his mother would begin now, and this is what he had come for. Uncle Hallow turned away from the ham and reached behind the corner to a set of shelves. Out from the shelves he pulled a dusty box and placed it in front of Kimball.
"Set these up Kim," The ham was burning. "I never get to play, and I'm not passing up this opportunity to beat you now that you’re an adult. I always felt bad doing it when you were young." “Did you?” Kimball smirked, brushing off the dust to look at the ancient box of checkers. “Sometimes.” Uncle Hallow smiled. Morning burned slowly into the late afternoon. Uncle Hallow allowed Kimball to win his fair share of games that morning, but in the early afternoon both had grown tired of slight stares and wide grins. And Kimball had grown tired of losing. There was still some light left in the shadows of the mountain surroundings. "I think I'm going to take a walk through the trails." Kimball looked at his watch. “Alright, you have about an hour of light left, so circle back after thirty minutes or so. But all the same, make sure to be back here for dinner." The pieces of checkers were being swept up into Uncle Winter’s small chubby hands and placed in the dusty box. Kimball headed out the door to enjoy a break.
1995, Ben Bisbee
For this piece, I remember we were asked in class to write a short, 3-page story that offered a lot of visual, environmental descriptions, but still told a story. I remember this because after re-reading this now in 2020, I recall feeling really slick because I decided to write a bit about the environment more literally too—writing a bit about environmentalism as well. Kind of plucking a bit of Native folklore out of my brain. I’m not even sure if anyone else in the class noticed, but to me, I had somehow done something really witty. And thus began my need to always create layers in my work—even if no one else could see or appreciate them, I knew they were there. I still do a lot of this today, oddly. I like to consider it a signature signed in lemon juice, where you likely won’t see it unless you apply a little heat.