Hourglass

Summer is on us in full force.

Driving to work this morning, the haze in the air gave a taste of drowsiness, of lassitude. The mountains to the south of us are famously known as the Great Smoky Mountains, but the Clinch Mountains in which I live and move and have my daily being are smoky enough under their own rippling power.

I passed a group of cows with their calves and noticed one little heifer with a white face, placid beneath a locust tree. She looked as if she’d forgotten to remove her cold cream when she tumbled out of bed at first light. I believe our eyes met for a moment, and the familiar thought passed through my mind: will she remember seeing me? Because I will for all this day remember seeing her.

The wildflowers, while not as operatic as the ones in Texas, are a beautiful sight to behold right now. Anytime I find a new plant, I work to discover its name and try to embed it in my memory. I take a silly pride in being able to name plants, trees, and birds. I wish I had been more attentive to my mother, who shared my love of the stars in the night sky. She could point out a staggering amount of constellations; I seem to have been merely overtaken in awe at the spangled splendor and didn’t learn the heavenly signs early. These days, I struggle to learn and remember the star-patterns. But love them I do, the stars. And the birds. And the flowers. And the trees. And the clean mountain air for which I am so, so grateful.

When I arrived at work, I retrieved the newspaper from in front of the building and took it inside, where I made a copy of the crossword puzzle. I take the puzzle home to my wife nightly, and she demolishes it usually in the time it takes me to fry up an egg. I glanced at the news headlines and saw an item about a march in a nearby town, a march to “raise awareness” of sexual abuse and assault. And I wondered, as I do when I encounter such things. I wondered if the people in this community are truly unaware of sexual abuse and assault. I wondered if a couple dozen sweating citizens, marching through the humid evening with candles in their well-intentioned fists will intensify this awareness and accomplish anything beyond what I suspect is the real motive for the march. We do so many things for such strange and wispy reasons. Time and energy, and all of it flowing towards our own horizons, and neither will return to us.

Time. When I was a child, one of the most fascinating movies was The Wizard of Oz, which was broadcast yearly on television in the era without video recording devices. I loved the story, but there were a handful of scenes that deeply frightened me. The living apple tree who slapped Dorothy’s hand was one. Scenes with flying monkeys, too. And the real terror-spark was the scene in which the Wicked Witch of the West locked Dorothy in a room in her castle. The witch turned a massive hourglass upside down and told the girl with brimstone glee that the hourglass represented the amount of time Dorothy had left to live. Growing up, we had a small and unreliable black & white television set, so I was a teenager before I saw the movie in color. I was delighted at the change to color when Dorothy’s house landed in Oz, and watched closely to see the vivid parade of tones and shades in the mysterious non-Kansas land in which the Midwestern girl had her adventure.

The hourglass scene stands out in my mind because the purplish-red color of the sand within the glass was so unlike what I expected, and yet it felt….right. And it also pleased me because it looked like red raspberry Jello powder, a childhood favorite of mine. My mother would make Jello a few times during the summer months, and she would always give in to my pleading and let me have a small juice glass full of the unset liquid Jello, sweeter than sweet, the glass full of the alluring color of the garnet in the high school ring I would one day wear. It was wise of my mother to allow me just the one glass of the potent liquid, because invariably after drinking the Jello, I would give her about fifteen minutes of my best material and then stumble off to take a nap behind the tattered couch in the living room.  Had I been allowed two or even three glasses of the stuff, I might well have started my own religious cult.

But after such a nap, I would wander outside into the delta heat — I don’t remember ever feeling hot or sweaty as a child, though the wintertime was torturous for my rail-thin little frame — and I would pretend to farm, or spend an entire hour throwing a ball onto the roof of the house, catching it when it came hopping back down at me, and then throwing it again. I would wander in the fields near our little house, and I would stalk dragons in the high Johnson grass and hide from murderous Kiowa in the treeline, and I would feel drugged from the wave-song of the cicadas and locusts that never stopped, never dropped, never got quieter until nightfall. I wandered in that sultry, hazy world like a charmed little lord, knowing nothing of taxes or real violence or expanding waistlines or real evil or arthritis or madmen in positions of power. I knew the green kingdom around me, and I loved it because I could feel it loving me back.

And I never, ever felt the sand slipping through that narrow neck.

These days, I feel it, and I hear its hiss, and I see the large pile below and the small funnel above, and I try so hard, so very hard, most every day, to drink in the air and the beauty and the colors, because they really do matter, much more than the things of which I was mercifully unaware back then, back when the heat could not touch me.

~ S.K Orr