1 post tagged “screenplays”
The first light of an false dawn was breaking through the gloom as I walked Ace the Wonder Dog through the neighborhood. As he sniffed and peed on every other thing I wondered if the day was to bring the usual miasma of stress, deadlines, soul dead engineers, traffic and such when the smell of lumber shook me to my core.
In the gathering light I spied a pile of fresh-cut lumber in front of a home soon to receive a remodel of some sort. As Ace peed on it I began to think of the lumber used to build the walls and windows in my life. As a child I grew up in a lumber town comprised of chainsaws, pick-up trucks and diners. A place where a family's entire life was captured in the felling, hewing, sawing and selling of trees. A place where the slip of a saw could spell eternal doom and sadness, where trucks laden with fresh-cut trees clogged the main street, their mighty engines spewing fumes as they hauled a community's sustenance to the mill where it was refined and sent to places far way. Places we only learned of from flickering black and white televisions and truck drivers who told stories as they ate pie in diners.
And I realized, as Ace tugged on his leash to move on, how far I had come from those trees and if the lumber that had taken my full measure in the early morning light was from the mountains in western PA so far away.
