I have always been repulsed by graffiti. Brazen boys in LA would scale barbed fences and climb twenty feet above the concrete to spray paint a cocky message above the 405 Freeway. I was not impressed by their bravado. I was annoyed. Who were they to trash the road sides, the trees and the public bathrooms? The miscreants have an ongoing tussle with maintenance departments, who roll in with their state funded trucks to eradicate the swirling script. 

 

There are names and dates splattered across the cabins in the western Pennsylvania woods we have slept in for two decades. I began to think of them as people, not just pen names. Did Josie and Billy ever come back, curious to see if their clandestine mark was still visible twenty years later?

 

Misdemeanors aside, I wonder what urgings bubble out in the form of painted fonts and scribbled watermarks. Are the paintbrushes fueled by a lonely teenagers who crave to be visible? Do the authors hunger for someone, even a stranger, to be a witness to their words?  

 

Marriage is intended as a place where two people are heard deeply, seen sincerely. It takes a lifetime to learn how to listen to the meaning disguised by patter and to look for the splendor wrapped in the mundane.

 

I wonder if the maintenance crews could be made obsolete by families that know what it means to be fully present with each other.