The Slow-Cooked Sentence

Historical picture of the Nevada mining town, sometime after its decline in 1869.
photo courtesy Nevada Historical Society

Her silver tarnished,
this old mistress of the mines
is bedecked in junk.

***

Silver City is a decrepit mining town, pocked with holes, studded with splintered shacks and adorned with rusted cars, glittering in the late afternoon sun. It’s a ghost town that’s been revived, so why think about living there today?

Because its tiny population — a smidgen of the 1,200 living there in its heyday — knows one another. They’re raising their children together, which is why kids were camping in the park on a weeknight, and the city’s summer program is providing lessons to a teen garage band.

Because it’s hills are shades of coffee, its air is perfumed with sweet, pungent sagebrush, and the night sky sparkles with stars. Living there is a conscious choice to be grounded in location, tied to the land, to know a place.

This is what my parents gave me when we moved to Silver Springs in 1980. I wish I could give it to my children.