It’s been compared to a patchwork quilt, and I’ll not bother thinking of a better image because the quilt is such a good one. Yes, the seamed squares of land in their varied shades of green look very much like a quilted bedspread, and here it is one pulled tight and flat across the bed, a bed that ends in a curved line of blue water.
The plane drops lower. The seams reveal themselves as roads, or maybe pale grey strips of seam binding, and those smallish rectangles– spots of decoration in nothing like a pattern– well, these are clearly houses.
Lower again and the quilt has disappeared. We have moved from over the bed, apparently, and now are descending over the playroom floor, and the children have left the train set out. Here roads cross over one another at tidy ninety-degree angles, here are cardboard houses with adorable planed roofs. Stiff trees, made, no doubt, of plastic, stand at attention, their shapes so recognizable as real trees that you find yourself smiling, amused at the artistry going into a plaything. Because that’s all these are, really: playthings. The trees are spaced before the houses at measured intervals, planted, you are sure, with bits of hardening gum. And the train set itself comes together just as a real one would, with silver tracks all running to the same place, where plastic boxcars, rectangles in varied colors, wait to be coupled with other boxcars and then pushed down the line.
A parking lot of plastic yellow school buses brings another smile, and here a baseball diamond: how cunning! And now the plane is low enough so that you can see a truck move along the seamed road, and cars, too. A magnet moves them, you are sure, pulling invisibly from somewhere under this vast table. Still you watch, amused, amazed, at the way the little car pauses at the intersection, at the way it makes the turn and then accelerates.
The plane is lower still and the houses, with their bits of plastic lawn, lie at intervals precise and perfect. You try to imagine life inside them and find you really can’t: there are too many of them. They can’t be peopled with anything like reality. Do children– real, live children– quarrel under those roofs? Do families eat inside, clustered around miniature tables, perched on impossibly small chairs? Does this one have the television too loud, and this one the voices?
And now you see her: the woman– so tiny– who with minute yet bold motion is rearranging into piles the yellow leaves that coat her lawn. And you see him, too: the boy in an orange jacket, legs pedaling furiously, flying on his bicycle down the sidewalk.
