Greenswards

by Lisa Powell

Now I don’t know what the next year or the one after that is going to bring, and if you say that you do, you’re a liar.  They’re still saying this is just a swing of a pendulum, and I’m sure that’s right, if you take a swing to go the length of five hundred years, not twenty like they mean.  I do love history, and this is fun for me, and will be right until it kills me, if it does.  I like to see the faces of the people, doesn’t matter if they’re sixteen or seventy-three, so many people who thought life would never be anything but some variation on what they’d lived already.  No concept of how wildly different people had lived years and centuries before, no idea even that almost every man on earth lived a life unrecognizable to today's people as living.  So, never having gotten that far, they never got farther, never got to know that the Visigoth that walked into Rome checked his shoe when he felt a rock inside, too, and might have been up late some night before because the baby was crying, too, and sometimes, too, he had a little gas.  We have no idea, these days, of what we have in common with people who have nothing in common with us.
I don’t know where this all is going, but I’d bet on it not going in any way at all back to normal.  Give us five years, we won’t remember what normal was.  Me, I’m hoping it all gets yanked up into some windstorm and scattered far and wide.  Take it all the hell apart.  But I’ve got a bit of a secret vice that moves me that way, I want to steal.

142 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 19, 2016