Judith Elaine Cowan

Listening for The Rumble Judith Elaine Cowan

"Sun slanted across the façade of the Junk Barn and Antique Emporium. It high-lighted the details of hundred-year-old pointings and patchings, messy repairs to a patterned frieze of darker brick, and rust-marks from anchor bolts in the carved stone. The yellow light crept along the bricks, changing like time, while the heartless world walked on past. He saw pathos in the sunlight outlining crevices and streaks of soot in the crumbling cornice. The second half of autumn was tragic, its beauty unsustainable. Most human hopes were futile, all work, all dreams destined for some junk barn." Following the free-wheeling disorders of the twentieth century, a quest for origins takes us down a pioneer road in the dark, through the nineteenth-century streets of a small Ontario city, and into the corridors and quadrangles of a 1960s university. At the end of autumn and the start of winter, this is a search for roots and a sense of place, played out in the transition between the old century and the new.