[Earth and Long Sky] The Road Upward

The paths he walked never soared into the clouds. They simply followed the pulse of the earth, choosing the uphill route at every fork. Mornings when sickles cut through the wheat, nights when tax forms piled up like hills, hours on guard as pines whispered beside his helmet, moments of writing as warplanes took off from the edges of his manuscript: these footprints, deep and shallow, eventually joined into one little path. It led to no summit. It simply let him look back and see that he had never lingered long on level ground.