Hums and Songs in the Wire

“Power lines are great places to hang my clothes—especially since my closet is full of birds. I make love like I have wings and know how to fly.”

― Jarod Kintz, Love quotes for the ages. Specifically ages 18-81.

My place is a place of overhead power lines. When I was a child in England overhead power lines served the role of laundry lines. Wet laundry secured by wooden pegs on lines that looped from tenement to tenement. Probably dangerous, though there were never fires, nor electrocutions.

When we came to Canada, power lines were the relief, the differential in the prairie landscape that provided a reprieve in mile after mile of loneliness and barrenness, mile upon mile from horizon to horizon. The wires sang in unison with the grasshoppers and, in the winter, the power lines creaked and groaned with the weight of snow.  Every spring in small town Canada, about the time of high school graduations, the power lines were bedecked with tied sneakers, urban legends of one sort or another, shoes swaying on power lines along with the vertical traffic lights.  Sometimes the wind, ever constant, made both the sneakers and the traffic lights horizontal. Actually, in that kind of wind, horizontal traffic lights would have made more sense. I wonder if they have realized that yet.

Here, in my place, power lines tangle with trees. They dance with the wind and threaten power outages. Because of the lost streams running under my neighborhood, underground lines are not an option. But that doesn’t upset me. Overhead power lines provide me with a degree of nostalgia. Memories of a childhood in England, and growing up with Prairie winds.

Because of the wind, or heavy rains, or the lines tangling with tree branches, our power is always at risk. But I feel we should always be at the mercy of nature. It keeps us humble. Spiders love the power lines as a base for building the most amazing of spider webs that routinely drape across my face in the morning as I go to the car. That’s cool. But I think, too, that the wires above me, serve to underline and emphasize the sky, like the emphatic line or two that we excise under an important word.