Jim Collins reached down and placed a handful of dirt into a jar. He tightly screwed on the lid and wrote the word “home” on a piece of tape.
The brutally hot August sun painted the fields brown. A lone irrigator struggled to keep up with the heat. Like the soil beneath his feet, his old hometown was drying up. First the textile plant went to Mexico. Then the grocery store closed. Now a corporation had bought the hospital and was closing it down.
Like the plants around him, the town was shriveling up and dying.
Jim stepped up in his truck and put a yellowed cassette into the player. Bruce Springsteen’s raspy voice began singing about the death of his hometown. “Funny,” thought Jim, “how did a New Jersey Yankee predict this?”
He passed by his grandparent’s house. It was now burned out and abandoned. He went by his old family home. It, too, was a ruin. He looked down at the job offer.
The truck slowed and Jim’s vision blurred from salt.
A lone man headed north toward Memphis. And a small Delta town faded into the evening.