Layksuh Hayull

I sat outside this morning with bible, breviary, and notebook, my coffee steaming in the cool and sugared mugginess of the day’s initial pages. Up in the woods in the direction of the new-born sun, a screech owl called, sounding as always like a tiny spectral horse whinnying. His appearance is early this year; I usually don’t hear the screech owls until mid-to-late September. And I sat and sipped and wondered if his eerie song was considered a harbinger in the mythos of any peoples.

The squadron of the buzzing bullets we call hummingbirds were about their business, and watching them reminded me of something from my pilgrimage to Gethsemani Abbey. After my wife and I left the absolute silence of the great church, we stopped outside to look at the statuary. Near the massive wooden doors stood a stone figure of St. Robert of Molesme, one of the founders of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists). A small, dark shape at the base of the statue drew our gaze, and when we approached, we saw that it was the lifeless body of a female hummingbird. I stroked her remains with my finger and wondered if the monks put out feeders for the little things or if they simply leave them to feed at the many flowers on the monastery grounds.

Yesterday morning, it was quite foggy. My wife and I took a walk and sat for a while up in the little country cemetery across the road from our home. We looked down on the fog as if we were above the clouds, and the hush was almost as deep as the Trappist church I mentioned above. Cows grazed on the hillsides, and round bales of hay dotted the pastures like inert beasts doing their own grazing — grass on grass, beige on green.

At midday yesterday, I went out to the small butterfly & hummingbird garden to see if the birdbath — a deep dish sitting in an old green wooden chair — needed filling. When I glanced over the fence at the front yard, a movement caught my attention. Was that a dog? Something swishing its tail –no, it was a fawn, about the size of a Labrador Retriever. Then another fawn stepped out beside it. And then Mama Doe strolled out and stood in our driveway, her ears catching all sounds while she scanned the area. I stood as still as I could, and when she looked towards the road, I slipped away, through the back door, and whispered for my wife to come and join me at the front door, where we watched the three deer gambol in the front meadow and then walk with stilt-legged casual elegance down the gravel road like tourists. It was thrilling to see them out at that time of day.

Perhaps they came to investigate the peaches and nectarines. I planted the fruit trees several years ago, and they have never yet yielded an edible crop. This year, for the first time, the branches are loaded down with fruit, to the point where I had to prop up some of the peaches so the boughs wouldn’t drag the ground. But both the peaches and nectarines remain hard as billiard balls. They look awful purty, but they are at this point mere ornamentation. Unless the deer like them.

Or the raccoons. Last night, I looked outside to see if the possums were eating supper. Noelle, her pouch heavy with her offspring, was eating with gusto. And then she turned all at once and ran away. I’m pretty sure my eyes narrowed in distaste as I watched an adult and two young raccoons scamper up to the possum dish and begin eating. I had been waiting for them since seeing them pull the same trick the night before. The large Hav-A-Hart trap was baited with marshmallows a bit farther away from the house, but they had opted instead to torment Noelle and steal her food. I burst out the door with BB gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other and snapped off a quick shot at the retreating adult. The BB struck her in the flank and she growled a warning at me as she disappeared into the brush. One of the youngsters was climbing the weeping willow tree just in front of me, and I got him twice before he scampered down headfirst and ran for the same cover as mama. The third one was trying to flank me and get around to the treeline on the other side where my little grape arbor stands. I shot and missed and then fired again and got him in the head, and he growled even more ferociously than his mother had. He shook his head and disappeared into the underbrush. I patrolled the area for another ten minutes, firing BB’s into the brush and trees and listening to the sounds of muted scampering. I checked on the live trap and saw that it had been triggered  — it was empty — and that the little creeps had reached their remarkable little front paws in and cleaned out the bowl of marshmallows. Take that, son of Adam.

In one of my recent walks, I spied a plant I couldn’t identify. It was a little more than three feet high, with leaves similar in appearance to a small magnolia tree’s, with two pale-green spiky seed pods. I snapped a picture of it and was going to monitor its growth and development, but on yesterday morning’s walk, my wife noticed that it had been cut down by the tractor that had mowed the shoulders of our gravel road. I’ve researched it on the internet but have come up empty-handed so far. If anyone knows what this plant is, I would be indebted for its name.

Several large sunflowers are growing next to the tomatoes and peppers in the kitchen garden, having “come up volunteer,” as the locals say. I had to re-tie and de-sucker the tomato plants this morning. They are decked with many, many tomatoes, in various stages of ripening, ranging in size from golf balls to softballs. I may have underestimated the required sturdiness of the stakes I used this year. We’re hoping the Mister Stripeys ripen soon, because they are a known favorite. So far, the Mountain Magic variety look good but are disappointing in their taste, being bland and somewhat mealy. Looking at them reminds me of the sink sandwiches I ate as a boy, so called because one is forced to eat such a sandwich (white bread, mayonnaise, slice of cheese, and lots of salt) with one’s elbows in the kitchen sink, lest one allow a pint of tomato juice to cascade down one’s forearms and onto the freshly mopped floor of one’s watching and un-amused mother.

After my prayers and Lectio Divina this morning, I sat in the cool air, looking at the mosquito netting of humidity draped across the holler, and thought of all the chores I’m behind on, and how each season catches me unprepared, even though I know it’s coming with each yearly cycle. Truly, I am a grasshopper and not an ant — I should probably begin wearing a straw boater.  I downed the last of my coffee and listened to the treble drone of crickets and frogs in the woods, the dawn-and-dusk music of waning summer, and I knew that if it went silent suddenly, I would expect to turn and see the black rabbit of Inle watching me with red eyes. But the drone went on, and I was able to sit in peace, smiling thinly to myself at the difficulty of arthritic hands in turning the pages of my breviary without tearing or marring them.

From this morning’s Lectio Divina:

Son, observe the time, and fly from evil.”

Ecclesiasticus 4:23 (Douay-Rheims version)

My wife prepared a king’s breakfast for me this morning: her Top Secret Q-Clearance Pancakes. Someday, bards will write epic poems about these pancakes. If I am ever dragged to the gulags, I will spend many bleak hours daydreaming of those pancakes and the little hands that prepared them with such love and skill. The cakes are lighter than dandelion fluff, round and tawny and running with salty butter, sitting on an earthenware plate next a bottle of dark syrup and a platter of sausage patties.

While she was cooking, my wife turned on the radio, which is tuned to a local channel run by the city schools. And out of the speakers came blaring this Baptist warning like a Klaxon horn into our wheat-redolent and sunlit kitchen:

“And you’ll be thrown into the layksuh hayull !!!”

Click.

~ S.K. Orr