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ADVENTURE SPORTS OUTDOORS “The Voice of the American Sportsman”
Having been in a bad car accident in my early 20’s as a result from hitting black ice, my vision of winter driving conditions sparks the absolute pinnacle of anxiety in my body. When your life sort of flashes before your eyes, you do everything you can to avoid that happening again. A four-wheel drive vehicle really By A.K. Thompson helped in that regard, but now I drive a tiny As I sit here and write, the first terrible little nothing Toyota Corolla. Most folks are cold snap of the season is upon northern probably happy about owning a new car, but Illinois. The air bites at my face if I venture I cannot stand it. It is too small and I just do outdoors, and the wind, however slight, makes not like it. It says nothing about who I am as the temperature feel at least 15 or 20 degrees a person, and right now I feel like a phony colder. I have found myself mourning the loss because I uprooted by entire southern life, of my southern Illinois winters. South you can moved back north and I cannot for the life of expect a snow event, and then expect it to me, understand why, except that I make more have all been melted away by the afternoon. Of money now, but Jesus Christ, that’s not what course, I had to contend with my fair share of life and happiness is all about. So, yeah, I hate mud in that case, but I will take mud over ice winter and I hate my car. any day. I am not certain how I will handle this As the cold tendrils of the small months thing called Winter. The only winter I’ve known reach out to consume me, I am forced to in the past years is the winter that Jon Snow reflect on the past several months. My must endure on Game of Thrones…so, as you summer and fall disappeared without my can imagine, I am anticipating the worst. knowing. I have not been present in my
THE COLD IS KEEPING ME
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life, only in my job that I love. I do not feel connected to the earth. I feel lost, like I’ve been pushed way, way off course and have no means for correction. I fear I have made a grave mistake. If only….if only! I think that. If only this great job were in southern Illinois! Oh, who am I kidding, if only never works. Instead, one must sit, content with things, or suffer in silence, which is what I have pretty much been doing. I feel like my body is now this walking creature, just trudging down a path that eventually ends in retirement, then death. My body breathes and eats and drinks wine and pets the dogs, but it is not here. It is somewhere else, far off, my beating heart in some cavernous darkness where I cannot hear it, I cannot see it, I cannot feel it. The Spirituality of place cannot find me here. Very often I catch myself praying that I find some sort of happiness similar to the happiness I felt in southern Illinois. Perhaps happiness is not the correct word, rather contentedness. I was always so relaxed and comfortable in my rented little 19th Century farmhouse, with my struggling bank account, on the quiet hill-top road I called home. I have felt no semblance of home here in the North. It feels dry and dusty, not humid and moist. The smell of the decay of so many leaves each fall, the swirling of so many bugs – the heat off a metal roof, I miss that. Here in the North the leaves are blown to shreds by the winds. It is
not a friendly landscape that greets me now – it is a stranger who seems to remember me, and gives me the side-eye because my motives in returning are unclear. This approaching winter, thundering toward me like the winds that push my house around is an enemy I must contend with -- it reminds me of what I have lost and what sits now in its place. I am fighting for myself right now. I have to find myself again, up here. I left her up here, tears still wet from the divorce. I left a lot of mistakes and heartache behind, and I thought that is where it would remain, yet I have returned to it, and it keeps me empty. For now. A.K. Thompson is curator of The Dillon Home Museum in Sterling, IL, a fiction writer and teacher who makes her home in northern Illinoisan. She holds a Master’s Degree in Writing and Consciousness from the New College of California, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University. She has served as an Assistant Editor for the Crab Orchard Review. Her work has appeared in STORY Magazine, Surreal South -- An Anthology of Short Fiction and Poetry, The Smoking Poet, and The Chiron Review among others. Friend Dirt Church on Facebook! Email A.K.: akdirtchurch@gmail.com
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