Hill Country Writer

A little prose poetry for today.


The sky turns darker than we expect in the hill country. Each evening in fall, clouds trickle over the hills and promise to hide the stars again. Tonight, my daughter swings after dinner and the wind and her movement blows her hair forward and back, forward and back, sometimes taking her words away from me. So I have to ask, “What did you say, honey?”

And she leans nearly upside down in the swing, smiling, her eyes like stars.

“I’m glad we moved to the pretty place.”

The money wasn’t as much as we’d hoped for, but the world doesn’t seem to value words like it once did. Or maybe it never did. Mark Twain died broke, I hear. As did Poe and Melville and Dickinson. Socrates wrote dialogues and took hemlock. Jeremiah wrote Lamentations and wept. Moses finished the Law, but never finished his journey to the Promised Land.

“You like it here, then?” I ask my daughter in the swing.

“You really really really wanted this job, daddy.”

“I did,” I say.

“And now you can teach people about God.”

She is four but still prefers me to push her; my hands on her back send her higher to the sky.

“No wishes tonight,” I say looking at the clouds.

“Silly daddy, we don’t really have to see the stars to wish.”

(Read more about Jean-Francois Millet's painting here.)

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