In the folds of your leopard cap lay a map, not of roads, but of intention. Soft-brimmed and loud with pattern, it rested beside your library badge and the Japan 2025 guidebook — as if your future self had already made contact and left tokens behind.
You walked Shoal Creek without planning to. The day opened like a cracked seedpod, shedding shadows of a story that wasn’t quite ready to vanish.
You passed the rain barrels — thick, ribbed bellies of water memory — and saw the old stone channel like a forgotten thought tracing the bones of the earth. And someone said the name.
Orange.
He lived here.
Still lives here.
Some say a man disappears after a century, but Orange didn’t.
He pressed himself into the limestone walls.
Wove himself into the roots of elms and water-loving sycamores.
When rainwater seeps through the cellar wall, that’s Orange —
coming back in.
In the early 1860s, he labored here, enslaved —
but freedom came like runoff — slow, soaking in through time.
And Orange stayed, not because he had to —
but because he chose
to haunt the place with his remembering.
The Moore-Hancock Farmstead thinks it owns the land,
but the land reports to water.
And the water, to memory.
Orange’s hands learned both.
You find this out sideways,
on a bike ride with no destination.
You, whose badge says Library,
but whose work is translation:
Systems. Stories. Code. Compost.
What is a rain garden but a kind of time machine?
Orange once dug a well and found water 14 feet down.
You bend over that well now,
see your reflection
shimmer beside his.
The guide says the cellar still floods.
They tried to seal it with cement —
but water doesn’t forget.
Neither does Orange.
He is not just a ghost,
but a gardener.
He watches you plant air plants in twisted wire,
dripping life along cables.
He watches you weave Spanish moss like constellations —
stars you could reach with wet fingers.
He is pleased.
You didn’t know he was there,
but your hands remembered.
Your garden makes shapes only ancestors recognize.
And now your passport lies open — unstamped.
Because you’ve already crossed over.
Not into Japan.
Not into the future.
But into the space where past and presence mingle
like creek water in limestone.
Shoal Creek is not a place.
It’s a frequency.
You tuned in.
And you will tell his story
not as historian,
but as gardener, artist, water-walker, staff of the Central Library —
dreaming beside The Genesis Machine,
because rewriting life begins with listening.