Vital Glory

Driving through my beloved South, I have often seen empty homes and gas stations and barns and restaurants completely covered by kudzu. Even in wintertime, the leaves go brown but they remain intact on the knotty vines. Through the years, my reaction to these scenes has been one of sadness, especially for the little abandoned businesses. I have always thought, “That was once someone’s dream. And now it’s ruined, and where are the owners now?”

Lately, though, my thinking has changed. These failed enterprises are scars. That is, they are part of the map of battles of someone’s life, marking the territory of hope and ambition and dreams and focused excitement. And they show the defeats and withdrawals, and the inevitable reclaiming of a particular place by the natural world. What was once controlled and overseen by this man or that family is now ceded to leaf and stalk and bird and centipede.

Scars are noble things. They remind us of the battles. They remind us that certain things were real. We can never really remember pain itself, but we can remember the effects of pain. The tumbledown cafes and gas stations with their gas pumps draped in green leaves declare with clear voices that someone attempted something here, on this spot. And it does not matter that the attempt failed or succeeded then fell later. What matters is that a living soul set out to establish something in a specific place, and part of his energy certainly must linger there among the ghosted rooms and ruined floor tiles and water-stained ceilings. Mustn’t it? Yes, it must linger, I am sure.

The kudzu is alive, it is glorious, it draws the eye to the tragic beauty of a man’s dreams, defeated though they may be. It preserves the rough outline of what once was, a savage artist’s rendering of a portrait.

Seeing the cascades of vines no longer brings sadness to me. The sight brings a kind of hope, a kind of pride, even. The kind of pride that arises in the spirit when one looks upon scars.

~ S.K. Orr