March 28, 2017, Ashdown (Arkansas.)
We’re going to make a sand castle, he said.
I was walking to town when I saw them. An older man and a little girl, playing in a sandy area off the street in Ashdown, Arkansas, a small town off highway 67 in the southwestern corner of Arkansas, by Texarkana. I asked if I could take their picture and he said yes, this is my grand-daughter, she’s two, we’re going to make a sand castle, she lives right there behind the trees. They had a red plastic wagon and two five-gallon buckets they were filling with sand they scooped off the ground.
His name was Michael, and she was Sophie. He worked at the lumber and paper mills in the area, and was taking care of her until he had to leave for work.
There was sand in her red rain boot, he shook it off.
The morning was getting warm.
I remember Ashdown from the first year we worked with this circus, in 2008, there was a tornado coming and the lot flooded, and the thought of it is all dark and eerie.
This morning I went walking from the lot into town, a long slow walk, flat, past houses crumbling down and others well tended, closed shops, two men working on a car in their driveway, talking loudly, their bodies protruding from the hood, suit-stained grey, a guy in a pickup truck with a cowboy hat that disappeared into the truck’s ceiling, another with a long white beard driving an oversized farm tractor, passing me by, the shadow of someone saluting me with two fingers raised from behind the wheel of a grey Mustang down a deserted side street.
There are train tracks slicing along the town, and highway 67, and a river museum, a few fast food restaurants and a farm supplies store, and not much else.
As always we’ll be gone tomorrow.
