Hope Is The Thing With Feathers
We saw the fence every day.
It's hard to miss when you're driving down the highways of El Paso. In places it's chain link, in others it's a dark brown wall. In places you can tell which side is Mexico, in others the two countries look like two halves of the same face. But no matter where you are, the border snakes along, a symbol of what it means to live where privilege and poverty divide.
Every morning I got up first and ran over toward the university. There's a paved trail over there, winding its way beside the highway into the distance where the Organ Mountains jut out of the dirt. And beside the trail there's a tall fence, chain link, keeping the speeding traffic on the right separate from the apartment complexes on the left.
At first I didn't notice it, but after a few days of dwelling on the idea of fences, you start to see them. One particular morning toward the end of the week, I was running along the trail when up from the dust and dead-looking bushes flew a little brown bird. It just got up and flew, over the fence to the highway side, and disappeared from view. Nothing extraordinary. Except I started thinking: how did that bird get so lucky, that he can simply fly over the walls that divide us down here?
The fence means nothing to him. The walls that divide families and economic statuses and cultures don't keep him on the ground. And I just really want to be like that bird.
In that moment I remembered something Zeke told me the day before. "Emily Dickinson said 'Hope is the thing with feathers.'"
It's hard to miss when you're driving down the highways of El Paso. In places it's chain link, in others it's a dark brown wall. In places you can tell which side is Mexico, in others the two countries look like two halves of the same face. But no matter where you are, the border snakes along, a symbol of what it means to live where privilege and poverty divide.
Every morning I got up first and ran over toward the university. There's a paved trail over there, winding its way beside the highway into the distance where the Organ Mountains jut out of the dirt. And beside the trail there's a tall fence, chain link, keeping the speeding traffic on the right separate from the apartment complexes on the left.
At first I didn't notice it, but after a few days of dwelling on the idea of fences, you start to see them. One particular morning toward the end of the week, I was running along the trail when up from the dust and dead-looking bushes flew a little brown bird. It just got up and flew, over the fence to the highway side, and disappeared from view. Nothing extraordinary. Except I started thinking: how did that bird get so lucky, that he can simply fly over the walls that divide us down here?
The fence means nothing to him. The walls that divide families and economic statuses and cultures don't keep him on the ground. And I just really want to be like that bird.
In that moment I remembered something Zeke told me the day before. "Emily Dickinson said 'Hope is the thing with feathers.'"
Comments
Post a Comment