Unphotographable

This is a picture I did not take

of a ditch at a bend in Huff Creek Road in Jasper, TX, where two dogs sat on a Sunday morning in early November, eight years and change from a Sunday morning of altogether different circumstances, and even though time has passed and trees have grown up and there's new grass, old leaves and even flowers poking-up in the fields, the place felt haunted -- it was as if there were a sound still in the air, an echo from that night that never really faded away, and as I leaned out my window and the dogs started barking and chasing my car, I kept driving, heading toward something familiar, and now, months later, when I feel occasionally rosy about the state of race relations in the South, I think about that place and that bend in the road and what was found there eight years ago, and how the dogs looked up at me, ready for the chase.