Unseen Connections

In The Whistling Season, by Ivan Doig, Paul Milliron pauses for a moment to muse outside his one-room schoolhouse:

"There at the waiting pump I could not sort such matters out totally, but even then, I am convinced, began in me some understanding of how much was recorded on that prairie, in those trails leading to the school. How their pattern held together a neighborhood measured in square miles and chimneys as far apart as smoke signals."

This passage makes me think about all the connections that are stitched into a community, often invisible and tenuous but there just the same. These connections are particularly hard to discern on the outer edge of a major metropolitan area. But I figure if Doig could see them on a prairie I ought to be able to feel them — and to sing them — in the suburbs.