OUT OF EDEN WALK

We’d been walking gingerly for days, both of us, barely recovered from COVID. The narrow farm lanes boomed with trucks, and their concrete lanes slalomed north from the old Silk Road city of Xi’an, crossing endless hills and gullies. A land stubbled with brittle cornstalks. With scraps of snow in the leeward sides of furrows. Magpies screeched like rusty hinges in the windbreaks of Chinese scholar trees. In some fields the oldest, broken remnants of the Great Wall jutted like rotten molars. Above: a weak sun the color of wax. Everywhere lay a pale coating of macaroon dust: on the houses, on the cars, on your lunch of noodles, on your dreams. Blown loess, it was. We were crossing the famous yellow earth plateau.