Universal Harvester

Not everybody wants to get out and see the world. Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you just want to figure out how to fit yourself into the world you already know.

It's not that nobody ever gets away: that's not true. It's that you carry it with you. It doesn't matter that the days roll on like hills too low to give names to; they might be of use later, so you keep them. You replay them to keep their memory alive. It feels worthwhile because it is.

That's what pictures are for, after all: to stand in place of the things that weren't left behind, to bear witness to people and places and things that might otherwise go unnoticed.

If you work with or around children, you often hear a lot about how resilient they are. It's true; I've met children who've been through things that would drive most adults to the brink. They look and act, most of the time, like any other children. In this sense – that they don't succumb to despair, that they don't demand a space for their pain – it's very true that children are resilient. But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn't break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn't mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wak of her mother's departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It's efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren't observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.

In the movies, people almost never talked about the towns they spent their lives in; they ran around having adventures and never stopped to get their bearings. It was weird, when you thought about it. They only remembered where they were from if they wanted to complain about how awful it was there, or, later, to remember it as a place of infinite promise, a place whose light had been hidden from them until it became unrecoverable, at which point its gleam would become impossible to resist.

You don't think about how you really have your whole life planned out until a part of it goes missing suddenly one day.

The wind comes across the plains not howling but singing. It's the difference between this wind and its big-city cousins: the full-throated wind of the plains has leeway to seek out the hidden registers of its voice. Where immigrant farmers planted windbreaks a hundred and fifty years ago. it keens in protest; where the young corn shoots up, it whispers as it passes, crossing field after field in its own time, following eastward trends but in no hurry to find open water. You can't usually see it in paintings, but it's an important part of the scenery.

A farmhouse has a way of feeling both timeless and impermanent without ever committing to either side.

It is hard to leave home, and sometimes it takes a long time. *

Still, picture the noble snake, having molted, slithering away, newly glistening. There’s the skin, in a big disorganized pile behind it. Is the snake asking you to notice that a snake was here earlier? No; the snake doesn’t care one way or the other. It has moved on. No, indeed, you can’t call a snake sloppy or careless or fault it for leaving tracks in its wake. Besides, who are you? Snakes have been here for millions of years.

Their grief wasn't his to bear, he knew. But it was inside him all the same, like a secret entrusted to a messenger.

It's in the nature of the landscape to change, and it's in the nature of people to help the process along...

By the time he was fourteen, Jeremy could locate magnetic north from practically any place in Story County, even in the total absence of known landmarks. Knowing where you were: this seemed like a big part of the point of living in Nevada, possibly of being alive at all. In the movies, people almost never talked about the towns they spent their lives in; they ran around having adventures and never stopped to get their bearings. It was weird, when you thought about it. They only remembered where they were from if they wanted to complain about how awful it was there, or, later, to remember it as a place of infinite promise, a place whose light had been hidden from them until it became unrecoverable, at which point its gleam would become impossible to resist.

But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn’t break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn’t mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wake of her mother’s departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It’s efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren’t observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.

felt like the most nourishing food he’d ever eaten, like something from the potluck at a wake.

I’m a guy who works on projects with blueprints, but I’m on my own here. It feels dark a lot of the time; I thought it would clear up, and it’s eased a little, but it’s still dark. So I watch what’s left of my life like a security guard on the night shift, checking the locks when I know I don’t need to, pacing the perimeter of someplace nobody’s going to break into, except that you never know. Something could happen. So you keep watch. They don’t pay security guards just because they’re a few bodies short on the payroll.

the engine of simple social obligation humming along at its audible Midwestern frequency. Everyone was nice to Irene, and she felt welcomed, though it’s one thing to feel welcome and another to feel like you belong

Another nagging little question lodged like a bit of grapeshot in his chest. It was nothing major, but the place where he stored them all was running out of room.

But secret agents, like God, only give signs to their confidants. They are also very cruel and even unhappy at times. At any rate, they keep quiet. —BENJAMIN TAMMUZ, Minotaur, translated from the Hebrew by Kim Parfitt and Mildred Budny

It’s hard to describe, this feeling of seeing your kids spending time together like adults, meeting up again after being out there in the world like free agents. There’s something giddy and unreal about it. I knew that boy when he was afraid of strangers. I knew them both before they knew how to talk.

There is no identifiable accent here unless you’ve cultivated a very careful ear. This is an easy place to live, milder in feel than Nebraska to the west, negligibly warmer in the winter than Minnesota to the north, of less imagined consequence to the world than Illinois to the east or Missouri to the south.

Working efficiently while a movie played was second nature to her by now, more comfortable than silence.

There was a comfort in watching movies together; Jeremy considered himself a little more high-minded than his dad, but they both disappeared into the screen's glow at about the same time, and they stayed lost once they got there.

Jeremy was young, but not so young. His mother's accident had taken care of that.

Ken Wahl saw Steve Heldt clearly; over the years he’d known lots of men who didn’t want to make spectacles of themselves, whose need to retain their composure often surpassed their desire to be healed.

When the spectre of the monotony he’s escaped sometimes rises in memory, it’s like childhood: another time entirely, a planet to which you can never return after leaving, a womb that nourished you until you were ready to breathe on your own.

The defining characteristic of moments, he knew, is that they pass.

A little drab from the outside, maybe: slow, or plain. But who, outside, will ever see it, or learn the subtleties of its textures, the specific tensions of its warp and weft? You have to get inside to see anything worth seeing, you have to listen long enough to hear the music. Or possibly that's a thing you just tell yourself when it becomes clear you won't be leaving. Sometimes that seems more likely. It's hard to say for sure.

but you get all kinds of thoughts when the sun’s strobe-lighting through the driver’s side window all day; and if you let yourself start thinking about the field without the highway, something happens to the way you take in the land. Your inner vision shifts. You think about fields with no one to see them, all that quiet life continuing on with no purpose beyond self-propagation. Tassels rotting in October. It gets to you, if you let it.