Ten Horizontal

The horizon separates the earth from the sky.

The horizon is the ancient delimitor of the range of communication.

Telegraph, radio, telephone, the web of web, all free us from the limits of the horizon.

If you’re moving, traveling, look ahead! The horizon is where you’re going.

There’s the horizontal.

The horizontal is the level, the stable, the flat, the surface easiest to balance on. Horizontal is a calm orientation. It’s the orientation of a good night’s sleep. It’s a place where stability is easy to attain. It’s where your pencil won’t roll off the table and the marble won’t roll under the bed.

Horizontal is your view of Woods Hole sidewalk graffiti.

Horizontal is clapboards reflecting on the side of McDevitt’s truck, in Buzzards Bay.

Horizontal is this view of the side of a matchbox. Worn through from the match scratching that started a winter’s worth of fires.

I posted this photo on facebook a while back, and my friend John commented on the photo. The image had brought back a powerful memory. Of his father. His father had had an old Model A. (I’m pretty sure it was a Model A….) He loved that machine, and drove it for many years. He was a smoker, and struck his matches on the dashboard. His many years of striking thousands of matches wore a patch, similar to the breakthough you see in the picture above, clear through the steel dashboard. How’s that for a memory?

Horizontal is the first asparagus of spring, on the windowsill.