Fragments From Floyd

When we expose our greatest hopes and precious things to strangers, we may be thought a fool. But the ordinary treasures we share may touch lives in ways we cannot imagine. This is the tale of one hopeful fool.

He prepared them lovingly, his precious mementos and carefully pressed flowers. He arranged them prominently on simple benches near the road. Just beyond, by the barn, a rough oak plank set across two tree stumps formed a crude table to display all manner of clippings and cards that flapped in the breeze-some brittle and yellow with age, others crisp and white from yesterday's journal.

Someone might care to turn the thin pages and read the forgotten stories, said the farmer to himself. Up around the bend near the low-water bridge, photographs were pinned haphazardly on the dark trunks of the maple trees-dog-eared, roughly framed or not at all; some new, most sepia toned from the passage of time, worn with a patina of love and memory. Trinkets and curios, found things and very private bric-a-brac lined the dirt road along a quarter mile of this seldom traveled path in a remote part of a sparsely peopled region of the rural land of Erehwon.

"Who will come?" she asked derisively. "You are a foolish old man" said the farmer's wife, "and if anyone comes, they will think you mad".

"Friends I have never met will come", said the farmer without certainty." Strangers will come who did not know that they wanted to know about these things that they see here until they have seen them. In seeing them, they will see into me and trust me, and we will share the deep things of our hearts with each other, me and my visitors."

And so, the days and weeks passed. Visitors did come down his road, but more often than not, they drove by without stopping. Yet the farmer thought in their passing they might have acknowledged in some small way his racks and tables and adornments. Many came down his road quite by mistake, looking for the shopping mall or seeking out some strange and terrible story not contained in the farmer's collection. Some who came surely thought him mad.

Sadly the chalk boards and scratch pads and the green rusty mailbox near the stone walk to the farmer's door remained mostly empty. From time to time, a visitor would pen "hello I came by", or "my name is Mary. Nice tables and stuff". The farmer was always thrilled to see that the page was not empty, but dejected when he had given so much of himself and learned so little of his visitors. He began to feel foolish and doubted himself and wondered why he felt the need for such open display of his silly yard-sale memories and special things that were sacred only to him.

And yet, in his more hopeful moments, he thought "There is a point to this and a purpose for Good that I cannot yet see. If I am faithful to my dream, they will come and see these things. They will share and invite me to their roads. And when the strangers are able to put their precious things for all to see on all the roadsides of Erehwon and the larger world beyond, we will grow to trust and care for each other. We will learn from and come to understand those that seem strange and unfamiliar, as I must seem now to my visitors."

And so, the strange farmer of Erehwon still to this day searches in his garden and woods, and in his memories and hopes and golden dreams, to find wonderful things to display before his visitors every morning.

And if he is mad, he is harmless; but if his strange ways become the ways of the lands across Erehwon and beyond, his madness will have become our joy. - Fragments from Floyd, July 2002