The Great American Wayshrines

The Great American Wayshrines are nestled in the corners between unruly wood and asphalt, dotting the rolling fields along the roadways and surrounded sometimes by un-mended chainlink fences. Sometimes, the grasses on their grounds are still kept in check by a few well meaning caretakers, hoping to pass them down to someone new, but more often (especially in those far and wide between the cities in the wild places for which no one stops or scarcely sees as they fly by) the cracking curbs of their un-mulched berms are overrun with early thistles, nettle and milkweed strangling the long dead untended shrubs within them. They are still places of passage. Though no one stops to make their quick offerings in any great number, there are few (mostly very young—too young to know or understand) who are drawn to jump the fences and pry back the plywood nailed overtop of where the windows once had been, and these young worship in their own way, base and sacred, and even though they may no longer know themselves, this land knows them. When they are gone, when they are grown, when they forget, and when the Wayshrines settle deeper in their earth and their bones break and sag and smooth and rot and come to be grown only of the land that they make holy as they go, there are few who will remember what they’ve lost.