The Tuesday morning print
April’s print is the little roadside chapel about a mile past the old gas pumps. I want to tell you where it came from, because that’s sort of the deal with these letters — I make the work and then I tell you the story behind it. The story is half of it, honestly. Maybe more.
It was a Tuesday. The weather had been doing that thing where it can’t commit. Cold one morning, almost warm the next, a wind that kept switching directions like it forgot what it was doing. I’d been up early, which I do sometimes when there’s something rattling around in my head and I can’t name it yet. I drove down to Ruby’s for coffee.
Ruby’s is the diner on the corner past the post office. It opens at six. You can sit at the counter and nobody bothers you, but the coffee shows up before you finish taking your jacket off. I had the eggs. I always have the eggs. I had brought a sketchbook because I knew I wasn’t going to be home for a while and the rattling thing wasn’t going to settle on its own.
I’d been thinking about a building. The little chapel a mile past the pumps. I’ve driven past it a thousand times — we all have, the locals I mean. It’s been there longer than I have, and I think it’s been closed longer than I’ve been alive. The paint on the front door is gone. The little cross on the roof leans slightly to the left. Somebody’s been keeping the grass cut, but nobody’s been going in.
What I was trying to figure out, sitting at the counter with my eggs going cold, was why I’d been thinking about it that week. Why that building, why now. I sketched it from memory. I got the lean of the cross right. I got the shape of the door wrong twice and the third time I stopped trying to get it right and just drew it the way it looked in my head. That’s usually when something starts working.
Here’s the thing I figured out. There’s a kind of building that’s past being useful but isn’t past being loved. Nobody worships in the chapel anymore. Nobody is going to fix the door. But somebody mows the grass. Somebody planted the little hedge along the side that’s gotten leggy and shaggy now. Somebody keeps showing up to attend to a building that has no congregation, because attending to it matters more than what it’s for.
I think that’s most of what I love about this stretch of the road. There are a hundred buildings between here and the next real town that are past being useful and not past being loved. Gas pumps that haven’t pumped gas since the Carter administration but still get painted every few years. Motel signs whose neon stopped working in the eighties that still get rewired every time a windstorm knocks something loose. A whole long highway full of small, quiet, ongoing acts of love directed at buildings that don’t need them anymore.
I finished the print Wednesday morning. I added the line on the back that nobody’s going to read until they flip it over: somebody is still mowing the grass. That’s the postcard side, in case you want to send it to someone who’d understand.
If you’re a subscriber, that print is in your envelope this month. If you’re not, well — Ruby’s still opens at six.
— Beth