Tiles
Hudson
1999
One thing I remember about my trip was the famous water tower located on the highest point in Ypsilanti. Janet Kauffman drove us by it on the way to her house in the country. I grew up not too far away in Indiana. It’s a glacial plain and had been swampy hardwood bog until it was cleared and drained. Janet’s place had been a farm, a farm surrounded by farms, farms in fencerow-to-fencerow corn and beans now. Her place had been a farm, but now she was letting it go wild. She was letting the place be what it wanted to be. She wanted me to see how it was coming back, show me how she had broken the tiles, the tiles buried underground. There were pools now and ponds percolating. The ground where we walked was spongy. Bramble and scrub sprouted from seeds that had been dormant for 100 years. Same thing happened when they broke the tiles in the Limberlost in Indiana too. It was wild and beautiful. Her neighbors thought she’d gone mad, she said, and patrolled their properties’ borders looking to staunch the leakage.