The Last Sunday of Spring

This morning when I went outside, it was just a bit warmer than it has been the past few mornings. Yesterday, it was chilly enough that my wife and I had blankets on our laps while we drank our coffee. The humidity is creeping back in, though, and this week will likely be an end-of-spring-in-the-Appalachian-mountains mixed bag of balmy humidity and hit & miss showers.

My frosty-faced old dog let us sleep in just a bit this morning, postponing her jaw-creaking yawns and face-slathering wake-up call until after dawn had slipped its leash and spread rose-hued light across the tops of the poplars. I accompanied her and my wife’s pooch down into the back yard and noted with some dismay the pile of gray feathers near the kitchen garden. The barn cat, whose work ethic has never been in question, apparently took one of the mourning doves at first light. The grass looked like a little feather pillow had exploded across the damp grass. I cleaned up the mess straightaway because my dog will crunch a feather just as soon as she’ll crunch a pork rind.  I left the dogs to go about their routine and went back inside to pour a cup of coffee. In less than a minute, my dog was barking her “Hey, there’s something odd going on out here!” bark, so I returned to the back yard.

Inside the small fenced area we call the Butterfly & Hummingbird Garden (it’s where we grow several plants that attract these winged wonders, and where we have hummingbird and songbird feeders hanging), I saw a very young possum. He was hunched down next to the trellis supporting the trumpet vine, munching a peach pit I’d set out for the possums last night, and was also helping himself to some of the black oil sunflower seeds the birds had tumbled from the feeder above him. He was about the size of a kitten, and had coal-black ears, giving him the look of a reject Mouseketeer. I backed away and fetched my phone so I could take a photo. After I snapped a few, I noticed that the little possum wasn’t reacting to me at all, so I began talking to him. I called him “Petey,” and asked him several questions about himself, but he gave no sign that he’d heard me. I also waved my arms around, windmill-fashion, but even though he was looking in my direction, he didn’t seem to see me. I wondered if he might be blind and/or deaf, and briefly considered changing his name to Tommy, but decided this would be bad luck for both him and me, so I left it at Petey.

I know a human Petey. He is a sweet, sad little man who lives in these mountains. Petey is mentally handicapped, very childlike and guileless. We are forever encountering Petey in the local shoppes, and we see him often clumping along the shoulder of the road, often sporting his spray-painted straw Stetson and his surplus Army dress coat. Petey and I once had a lively, circuitous conversation in the checkout line at the grocery store about how he purchased a stereo system from “the high sheriff” of the county. People in these parts look out for Petey, and he is a benign, reliable figure on the periphery of many lives.

Yes, I think Petey is a good name for this young possum who appeared here today. I secured the dogs inside the house and opened the garden gate so he could make his way out without difficulty. He soon left on his own, apparently sated on peaches and seeds.  I’ll watch tonight to see if he creeps out and joins Dusky and Noelle in the nightly buffet beneath our Japanese maple. Perhaps he will gaze up at me, as the two older possums do, with his wizened and watchful face.

***

My wife and I were talking yesterday about my mother — God rest her soul — , laughing about some of the things she used to say. Mother was one of the most ferociously intelligent people I’ve ever known, with an encyclopedic knowledge of folklore, cooking, home remedies, and esoteric Southern political history. She was as down-to-earth and grounded as could be imagined, but she also held some quite odd little beliefs about some quite odd little things. My wife would agree that her son has inherited this quirk-gene.

The memory that really got us a-hooting yesterday was the time that I dropped a match while handing it to Mother in her kitchen. Mother smoked about three or four cigarettes a day for most of her life, and she always lit them with wooden kitchen matches that she kept in a little holder nailed to the wall. On this particular day some years ago, I reached for a match at her request and fumbled it, and the match fell behind the cook-stove. I shrugged and reached for another one. Mother wasn’t having any of that.

“You need to git me that match, doll,” she said.

I looked at her and saw the set of her jawline. “But Mother, it won’t hurt anything. I’ll get it later. I’ll get the broom and sweep the whole kitchen for you.”

No and no. “You need to git me that match. I won’t be able to rest until you git it. Or if you don’t want to, git outta the way and I’ll git it myself.” She was already turning to find the broom.

“But why does that one match matter so much?”

She looked at me with That Look, the one where she lifted her head and looked down her nose with a half squint, like a landed duchess evaluating the trustworthiness of a serf. “Because.”

“But Mother –”

“I’ll tell you why! Because a roach or a spider might git aholt of that match and run along that baseboard with it in its mouth and rub it along the wall and strike it, and then it’d start a fire, and I might be asleep and not even know that a fire had started, that’s why!”

I craned my neck and peered over the edge of the stove, looking at the thin space between it and the wall, hoping so much that she couldn’t see my face. Trying so hard to look serious. Trying so very, very hard to dispel from my mind the mental image of an insect with a wooden kitchen match clamped in its slavering jaws like a German Shepherd with a bone, racing along the perimeter of the kitchen with the white phosphorus tip dragging against the painted wood, a diabolical expression in its eyes, a true firebug, a thing from the abyss, an adversary of a house-proud woman, a woman who would not react well if she saw the dancing light in my eyes or the miniature spasms at the corner of my mouth in that moment.

So I took the broom from her, and I seem to recall that we were all able to sleep relatively soundly that night. And yesterday, my wife and I laughed that pure laugh, the one that rises from happy memories and the wonder that human beings can give us when we look at them with love and delight.

I loved my Mother, and she delighted me so often. How is it that she is silent now, and I cannot call her and hear her voice?

***

And how is it that at times, human beings can display their pain and their suffering with such clarity that it knocks us backwards and unsettles us for hours and hours?

Yesterday when we were finishing up our errands in the next town, we stopped in at the Dollar Tree to pick up a few odds and ends. I was moving down one aisle, searching for pocket-sized notepads, and I saw a woman walking towards me. I didn’t pay her much attention until we were almost abreast, and then I looked at her and smiled and nodded. And I hope my smile didn’t falter or freeze on my face.

The woman, who was probably in her sixties, had been badly burned. Her face was a knot of scar tissues and fissures and ropes of pink and glossy flesh. She had no eyebrows, and her mouth was twisted to one side the way old-time movie villains would stage-whisper to their cronies. She looked into my eyes, and in one rush of something that felt like breath, I saw her pain entire. I saw the physical agony, and the long months of treatment and recovery, and I saw the averted glances and the cruel smiles and gestures of children and teenagers, and I saw the wariness that keeps the woman forever searching the faces of those she meets, searching for a kernel of kindness in the chaff-basket of shock and distaste and fear that passers-by carry with them.

Automatically, I said, “Hello!”

And the woman said, “Hi!” Her voice was tortured and raspy, the aural equivalent of what rusty water tastes like, but her tone was cheerful and full of energy. She pulled her sweet face into a smile, and I smiled even harder at her, and then we had passed each other, and I found the notepads or the duct tape or the paper towels or whatever was on the shelf next to me, and I stood there staring at the shelf, holding my breath and feeling the impact, the blow of the pain that I’d sensed, the vicarious experience of a woman’s suffering. My wife came up next to me and saw the expression on my face — she asked me about it later, confirming what she’d suspected — and put her arm around my waist. And as we finished our shopping, I loved that little woman with the scarred face and the watchful eyes, loved her with my unworthy heart, loved her with my unscarred self, and I looked at my hands on the drive home through the mountain roads and wondered many, many things.

Blessed be God Who hears the cries of those in agony, and Who scrawls down a record of their sufferings in His so-often illegible cursive strokes.

***

And this afternoon, I stood and gazed across the hollow of the valley, the “holler” as we say it here, watching the cattle in their widget stances and the sheep in their Nerf-ball contentedness, and the mounting clouds in the west, and I saw a hawk riding the thermals.

He barely moved a wingtip, circling and gliding and cutting through the hazy air like an omen, like a Jove above the fields of hay and corn, the fields where rabbits and mice hide, the fields where arrowheads are tucked into hiding places where they fell with their wooden shafts after leaving the taut gut strings tuned to the key of history, the fields where blades have dug out livelihoods and where soda cans,discarded by the progeny of the pioneers, wink in the sunlight…where the small, nervous creatures creep at dusk to see about their daily bread and their broods of young and the never-resting versions of death that can come at them any time from any direction.

The hawk soared and he dropped and he rose and he leveled off, his hooked beak leading him, roped like a kite to his shadow far below, the shadow riding and rippling across the floor of almost-summer American soil. He looked like more than a bird, more than a predator, and he looked anything but mindless, anything but propelled by mere instinct.  I whispered to him. “Joy. It looks like joy, what you’re doing.”

You’ll forgive me, I hope, for believing that he heard me, and that he liked the words I spoke.  Like my mother before me, I have my own curious beliefs.

~ S.K. Orr