Ascension Sunday

Cooler, drier air, and the hours of sleep last night in my chair were deep and sublime. Then the elderly dog decided that 0420 was a pleasant hour to awaken, and she insisted that I join her. Her tools of persuasion include full-facial swipes with her tongue and digging at my arm with her spade-sized paw. My wife got the same treatment and so here we went.

A pre-breakfast ramble in the fresh morning braced me for the day.  I took several photos and gathered some wildflowers — blue chicory, daisy fleabane, and Queen Anne’s lace — planning to construct a vase-full for my wife. She harvested her own flowers on our walk last evening, including wild pink climbing roses and a beautiful unidentified vine with red-rimmed, heart-shaped leaves. I saw a bumblebee wooing a sweet pea blossom and snapped his picture. He seemed much less of a natural model than the exuberant woodpecker I spied when was only a few yards from the house.

We finished our breakfast off with some pear preserves we bought last month in Gatlinburg, and I was reminded yet again that I could eat breakfast food three times a day, every single day, for the rest of my life, and I would never tire of it. What is it about breakfast food that is so agreeable to me? Perhaps it hearkens back to my boyhood, when my mother would sometimes fix my sister and me a plate of eggs if the weather was too hot to sleep in our decidedly UN-airconditioned house and if we had enough money to splurge on eggs. Comfort food in the truest sense of the phrase.

I weeded the kitchen garden after breakfast, which means that I moved a sharp hoe around the golf ball-sized rocks from which I can never escape. Neither the tomatoes nor the okra have blooms yet, but all of the pepper plants are bowing under small peppers the size of walnuts.

This is the season for yard sales, and we passed several yesterday while we were out running errands. It’s too easy to accumulate things in this age, and none of us needs most of what we have, so it’s a simple matter to pick up items for a good price. I mused to myself how lovely it would be if I could host a yard sale for old beliefs and ideas I once held dear, the ones that upon acquiring them seemed so useful and apt, the ones that now gather dust in the cellar of my heart and beneath the stairway of my mind, the ones that, when I pick them up and blow the dust off of them and turn them just so in the light, make me think, “Now why did I ever think this would be of use to me?” When he was in financial straits some years back due to tax problems, the singer Willie Nelson released an album titled “Who’ll Buy My Memories?” An excellent question, Willie. I would very much like to recoup some cash for my own discarded and outgrown ideas.

Walking from the back garden to the back door, I noticed movement near the gate. Two wood thrushes were diving at the ground, pecking furiously, and clearly agitated. Wondering what was going on, I started for the gate and then saw the slender head of a black snake lift from the grass and strike feebly at the birds. Aha. I backtracked and retrieved a hoe from the shed and went to the gate. The wood thrushes flew up into the trees and I examined the snake, symbol of ancient enmity  between his get and mine. He was a bit worse for wear; the birds had pecked some pretty decent divots into his scaly hide. I scooped him up with the hoe and took him to the front garden, where an ad hoc nature preserve has arisen over the years over the skeleton of a large fir. Nowadays, blackberries and black walnuts and wild grapes and wild cherries grow there, and the songbirds spend much of their days in the cool green place, singing and resting between visits to the feeder and the birdbath. My pet possums also spend a fair amount of time in there.  I deposited the snake amid the honeysuckle and the berries. He stared at me with impassive gratitude, and I hope he’s on the mend after his brief stint as Tippy Hedron on the backyard summer stock circuit.

And so Sunday is slowly deflating, and the sound of the fountain in the front garden coming through the window is making me nod, so I will go and find something to do in the shade. To be able to move freely through sun and shade, indoors and out, is something I never take for granted.

~ S.K. Orr