My valley town has trees. And lampposts. And other things that are so tall, you feel most peculiarly small, like a toddler trying to reach the kitchen counter. Majesty is the town's canopy--wrought with copper sconces above banks who hold everyone's assets. But the kids bring it back down by a whole codex of symbols sprayed behind tiendas and pizza parlors named after towers. If the trains could get down through the mountains into the town the kids would color inside their boxcar's lines. Paint curls from the Welcome signs and the Lion's Club crest sways from the one nail left to hold it in place. It acts as the town's greeter, I suppose. Waving at every minivan that pushes past the sign.
The speed limit is ridiculously slow, but the townspeople know no cops are on duty most of every day. It's okay, because the people are decently conscientious. They swerve away from pot holes and avoid driving by schools around when the kids are let out.
The young people buy National Geographics and decide to travel so they can get some ethnic fabrics and to get some colored yarn to wrap their hair in. There is a lake-pond mid-city where haphazard teenage love affairs are written into poems after they skinny dip in secret. The lampposts don't dare to reach out there.
This place, it was a fine place to forget and quite easy to forget. My parents have a house that isn't beige but is the beige of blues, a slate color of the winter sky that peeks through about when the middle-schoolers are let out. It blends in. Even the garden, which my parents spent the entirety and beyond of their mortgage payments to perfect, blends in without an inch of deviation from the neighbors, either side. My dog is the only thing that keeps our home from being immaculate. I used him as a pillow growing up, not caring so much about the grunts he gave. I would come home to rest my head on his thumping breast.
And, it is of this town that the gods get to choose.
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