Dimming And Shining

I took two walks today instead of my customary one. The mist and the fog held onto the hills, and I was restless inside the house, looking out at the swirling gray and white.

In the morning hours, I ranged across the pastures, picking my way through the brown remants of devil’s trumpets and thistle, prodding cow patties with my homemade staff, listening to the crows in the treeline and thinking of Huginn and Muninn, aware of my slouch hat and staff, and wondering if I closed one eye whether I might feel wiser by day’s end.

And then I came to the crest of a ridge. Instinct told me to slow down, and as I lifted my head to peer down into the valley, I saw several things moving on the opposite ridge. What — oh, turkeys. And a large deer standing among them. They hadn’t yet seen me, but I knew the skittish birds would spy me soon enough. And just as I had that thought, the turkeys began hurrying away towards the trees. I saw the deer’s head come up as well. And then a large doe who had been invisible down the slope just twenty or so yards to my left broke cover and bounded down the hill, clearing the distant fence, and racing up to join her kinsman as he followed the turkeys in their escape.  I watched for just a moment, then whispered, “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world.” I turned to make my way back towards home, and I heard a sound like a bed-sheet flapping in a high wind. When I turned back, I saw the turkeys lifting into the air as one, their wing-sounds carrying across the wet field to me. Just then, a loud crack off to my right, to the south, made me jump. Gun, I thought. But no, I watched as a large oak standing on the valley floor trembled. There was another crack, and the tree fell to earth. I stood in the presence of gray wonder. Then I turned and trudged back to my home, my face stinging with cold rain as the mud pulled at my boots.

Today is the anniversary of my father’s death, gone some decades ago, a man I really never knew, seeing him a lesser number of times than the number of years his body has rested in the delta soil. The mystery of the man and his presence and his fingerprint on me was much with me all day as I sat and read and enjoyed the warmth and love of my wife and animals.

In the evening, as dark was reaching towards us, I went out again. Up in the woods, I moved with as much care as I could, not wanting to frighten any creature that might be sheltering up there. As I came to a clearing between some poplars, the ground seemed to move, and I realized that the wind was blowing the leaves in fits and starts. But then I thought again — it was misting, and the leaves were all sodden and heavy, and they would not lift even in a strong wind.

What I saw was a group of varied birds. They seemed to be flitting and feeding. Finches, titmice, chickadees, cardinals. Each of them, separately, would lift a foot or so into the air, then drop back down onto the damp mast, pecking, searching, and speaking in their musical prits and wheets. I watched them and thought, not for the first time, that all living things want a tender companion with whom to share the days and the evenings. I gave them a wide berth as I circled back to the house, wiping rain from my face and inhaling the cold, damp breath of God.

A small cemetery sits within sight of my front door, and when I returned home, I looked up at it, thinking again of my father. Where do we go when we die? The older I grow, the less satisfactory are the stories I learned and parroted as a child, the less convincing are the doctrines and religious tenets I once taught as a man. The idea of ghosts has forever been with me, and in the last remains of this day, looking west, I wondered if some of us remain and flit through this world as ghosts, as spirits of some sort.

I have at brief and sporadic moments throughout my life felt comforted and refreshed by small, unseen forces. A cooling breeze on my brow when sweat-soaked on a summer’s day….the singing wind that circled our small family when my wife and I stood at a water’s edge years ago and said our vows…the way our animals gathered in silence at the foot of our bed and stood vigil while my wife wept upon receiving the news of her brother’s death…the whispers — below my physical hearing — that sometimes come to me on the twilight prairie between the land of sleep and the land of wakefulness.

And when I think of those unpredictable moments of comfort, I wonder if they are the work of ghosts. And if they are, I think I could be quite content, once my physical frame finally fails, to wander the land and approach any remaining loved ones and let my whispers bring cooling breezes to them, to let my murmurings slow down their worried minds and place them in a gray, misty state of mind and spirit, to work off the wrongs I have committed by comforting whom I could.

I think I could be quite content.

Requiescat in pace, Daddy.

~ S. K. Orr