Tell Me a Story

Mercer Arboretum, tucked beside Cypress Creek and woven beneath Aldine Westfield, has become the place where I turn over the mental 'leaf-mold' that feeds many of my stories and poems.

Just as often, though, I find places that make me wish that I could be a patron and commission the stories that pop up as I'm walking down the paths. Today, it was the sound the of the fountains as they burbled rather than splashed a broken trunk that looked like a castle emerging from the side of a tree.

What is the story of this wooden castle? The tree cradles it, moss-green trunk swelling around behind the towers and holding the entire thing as if it might be a dryad's plaything. Does anything live in this ruin? Is it a ruin? Are there armies of insects that patrol it or courts of mayfly larva being trained for their summer dances? Has it seen battles? The kind that weaken from within or the sundering instant of a lightning strike? I don't have a clue, although I feel strongly that it has a story.

And then, there is the sound of the fountains. How did the photographer capture the Ploomph! of the water so that everyone who sees the image feels the water gather up in the pipe, climb the rickety thickness of the water and then fall over to thump itself back into the chill mass of the water? Does it chuckle to itself, playing at being younger or warmer than it is? Is it daydreaming in a clear blue funk beneath the grey sky and the grey columns? How do you capture that heaviness? The sense of practicality--the ploonk of water filling a tank rather than the splash of a summer fountain?

There are stories that I want to tell, but these--these are the stories that I want to hear.