Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Have a Seat
Jerome, Arizona, is high up. It’s not as high up as some towns in Arizona but it seems to be everyone’s favorite high up town. It is old and carefully quirky, all the rust is artful and intentional and the mood is specially crafted to make visitors regret many of their life decisions.
Why don’t we live up on this mountain so we could sit in these red chairs?
The red chairs almost immediately filled me with envy although, a while ago, I owned blue chairs just like these that I could have painted red. But those chairs would have been on my front porch, not on this little terrace with the rusty railing and sunflowers waving in the background. I wouldn’t have been able to see for miles seeing on my repainted red chairs on my front porch, only across the street at the doctor unloading her Target haul and the rabbi changing his flat tire.
I so loved the red chairs in Jerome, I asked my husband to take a picture of me sitting in one. The picture came out shadowy and dark. I looked like a tourist sitting in a red chair instead of my imagined self, relaxing up high at home in Jerome. I considered the photo and deleted it from my phone. I’d wanted a photo that would have made me look like I belonged there but I didn’t so it was an impossible wish. So I took another photo with no one pretending or yearning.
The red chairs were perfect vacant. I can see that now.
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Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
Such a lovely view!
what a good eye you have, yes, they were perfect, sitting empty, right where they were
I’ve been there. Did you go on the mine tour?
Reblogged this on Red's Wrap and commented:
“The red chairs were perfect vacant. I can see that now.” I am yearning for the perfect red chairs in Jerome, Arizona.
I’ve lived in Arizona. Trust me, the doctor’s haul and the rabbi’s tire are more interesting. But those chairs are mighty fine, aren’t they?
This is nothing so good as “intentional rust”–great phrase!
You made me smile. Why is it that some towns are so perfect, or seem so perfect to our visitor’s eyes that we feeling a grudging resentment at that perfection? I love the way you write. Thank you for sharing. I felt that way about Fredericksburg, Texas at a little bed and breakfast named The Cotton Gin Village.