March 19th, 7:15 AM, back at the loading bay behind the produce terminal on Whitcomb Road, where all of this began in November with a bound column standing on a steel plate in the rain. The tenth station is the same dock, the same wet concrete, the same rolling door that has not opened once in the entire time I have been coming here. The difference is that the material is folded. I brought the runner in from the apron on the first warm morning, hosed the mud out of it in the yard, dried it over two days on the fence at Dunnery where the second station was hung, and then folded it the way the men on my old route folded a tarp: in half, in half, in thirds, corners squared, lines coiled and laid along the right edge. It came to eleven inches high on the plate.
The viewer will want an ending with more event in it. There is not one. The procession does not end in fire, or in a landfill, or in a gallery. It ends the way municipal things end, which is folded, stacked, and put somewhere it can be found again. What survives of the winter is a stack the size of a suitcase and one square of tan canvas, centred on the top fold, exactly where I stitched it in November before any of this had happened to it. Everything else in the series is torn, or gone, or was never the point. The patch outlasted the tarp. I have thought about that every day since, and I am not finished thinking about it. Plicatum, non desitum.
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