She wanted me to understand that these towns and their streets once told a different story, one unlike the suffocating rust, slivered glass, and dust. These streetlamps, she said, illuminated company stores, bustling taverns, and the youthful faces of a town that, in its prime, really was beautifully gilded.
In those days, on those vibrant streets, the white-painted buildings lay nestled, the sleek white cars slumbered, and complimenting white clothes clung below white smiles. But many who lived there knew that pristine picture stood atop anything but white. Beneath those polished streets stretched the murky black caverns, where the blackened faces and bodies labored their lives for black gold. Many yet, buried among that black rock, their lifeblood. That life was difficult, often brief for the miners and their families she explained, but there was something raw, something real to be found in those towns, a distilled vision of life and death. Our dreams, their costs.
But dreams, like veins, can run dry. And when the coal dried up, so did many towns. The price became too high, the dreams too far. Some held on, clinging to something, maybe anything, while others fled, chasing dreams anew.
Now, standing in one of those towns, kicking a stone along a desolate sidewalk, passing boarded windows, it's hard to imagine the streets she described. The motion, the life. Where have those dreamers gone? What is a dream worth, and will the next end like this?