This place used to be full of people. Every house was the home of some red-cheeked family

Now the largest family is a group of bugs with shiny armor in the overgrown grass

These roads would have been in constant use by cars and carriages and people coming from over the hill on foot and on bicycles

Children on their way to school, farmhands on their way to work

And now they’re mostly used by cars quickly passing through

There’s the old house that had so many children, eight or nine of them, by now all of them long gone

But my grandmother would always say their names from youngest to oldest when we walked by that too-small house

Beyond the crossroads, fields sprawl in all directions, a patchwork of yellow and green and blue rectangles framed by ominously hissing pine trees

A hundred people used to work in that field and now it’s wildflowers

And way up in the air the ridiculous dome of the noon-blue sky and its constant Sun, it’s like if you took a flashlight to a plastic snow globe

It still just shines and shines

Some old houses are deserted and remain in the condition that they were abandoned in with clothes and letters and old photographs of people leaning on agricultural machinery

Peeking in from the window of one such house I saw a newspaper with a full coffee pot next to it on the former kitchen table once

This is a maze of dusty dry-ditched country roads. I only hear birds singing and insects buzzing and the never ending dull hum of mystery from the trees

Nevertheless when it’s night, the nearby village turns on its strange yellow lights and people pour out into the only street

The cover image belongs to the author.