when it's getting crowded.

I felt all week as though I were going to scream. I felt as though there were too many pieces of a burgeoning, changing life for me to hold, too many faces, too many versions of the same, care-worn smile to be spread across too much space.

When I was a kid, and my dad and I would drive from Dodge City, Kansas to the tiny town of Randall where my grandma lived, we would drive through a place called Cawker City. And as the highway pulled through town, in a park under a shaky old picnic awning stood the creme de la creme of nothing-nowhere-sights-untold midwestern tourist traps.

This ramshackle leaning roof on stilts housed the World's Biggest Ball of Twine.

I would love to be joking. Even more would I like to be joking about how much I loved that hunchbacked fantasy. It represented one town's need to be more than just a potty break, just north of quiet, flat Highway 36. But I did, and in their endless quest to stay the biggest, they added to the ball, and added to the ball. And eyes squinting against the glare of my memory, my distorted self history bore witness to that ball of twine as something that did not fit, that could no longer live under that tiny roof that would soon have to sit atop the head of that squatted twine ball.  And this week, I was that poor faltering building, with too damn much inside.

and then I went in search of pictures. To drive my point home.
I did my research. and this is what found.


Either time had changed the housing in my eyes, or the citizens of Cawker City had expanded to make room for the sheer mass of their fantasy. They saw that in order to keep their piece of singularity in the world, they must make way for it's bigger burden. Make a home for the weight that must be carried in the name of claim. A safe place in which to house the small voice that let them scream above the rest, for just a moment.

So they expanded.

And celebrated it.

They put the wonder of their farmland world in great works of art. And made their town a shrine.


And so it is that, once again, my metaphor must change me.

I must expand myself, and keep wrapping myself in the trappings of a developing heart. Stringing myself up. And when I am made full to bursting, 

I must make way.

And celebrate. :)