Glimpsed On The Drive Home

A red-tailed hawk sitting on a telephone pole, watching the valley below him, immense in his majesty.

A group of nurses in the parking lot of a clinic, guffawing and gesturing. They were all quite obese, the patterned fabric of their scrubs stretched to the splitting point, and one of them had blue hair.

Two old donkeys at a fence by the highway, standing head to tail as if gossiping. The brown one was rubbing his chin along the flank of the gray one. Both of them had their eyes closed in dreamy contentment. A small rabbit was hopping along the weedy ground behind them.

A four or five year-old child in the back of a Nissan, turning to scowl at me and then giving me the finger. His mother glanced over at me and scowled just like her son. Then she saw him in the rear-view mirror and laughed at his obscene gesture aimed at a man old enough to be her father.

The black, greasy patch on the asphalt out in front of the roadside market just three miles from our home, marking the spot where a man was killed in a car wreck this past Saturday.

Three or four cords of firewood stacked alongside of a cabin, as pretty and orderly and geometrical as a work of art.

A church sign that read “God never says, ‘Whoa! I didn’t see THAT coming!’ You can trust Jesus!”

A young woman throwing a fast-food bag out of the window of her car at a stop sign. When she saw me staring at her, she opened her mouth to say something, her face twisted up in anger, and I looked away in order not to see her mouth something ugly.

An elderly man trying to coax his Dalmatian to jump up into the bed of his pickup truck. Both of them looked as if their bones ached, and both of them looked exceedingly happy.

The stretch of mountains just to the east of our home, dappled finally with fall foliage, looking “as if God Hisself stuck His hands in a bucket of glory and flung it all over them mountains,” to quote my maternal grandmother.

The hummingbird feeders hanging untouched and motionless beneath the maple in the front yard, filled with slightly milky nectar.

My wife’s little dog’s snout parting the blinds as I pulled up in front of the house, her face split in a grin of unalloyed joy. My much larger dog stood behind her, grinning with equal pleasure at my homecoming.

~ S.K. Orr