Content

When I stepped out onto the damp boards of the back deck before dawn, I could hear the spring frogs down in the holler, calling from the natural marsh of the stock pond. Dixee brushed past me out the door, pattering down the steps to relieve herself in the grass, and a cardinal in the pines warmed up, his chips and clicks crescendoing into a song of dark morning color. I saw the wisp of light in the eastern sky and longed to stay at the farm, longed to stay away from town, away from chattering voices and intrusive opinions and the moldy crumbs of civility that pass for conversation these days. My mind went for a moment to my work, to my coworkers. Yes, we’re all in it together, but they are alien to me as I am sure I am alien to them, and the years have burnished my belief that I will never be that man who is kind to all, concerned with all, sympathetic to all. I am selective in my congeniality, and brutal in my selectivity, qualities which I suppose make me more akin to the birds in the trees than the drones in my office.

I fed Jinx and watched him eat, comparing his dainty way at the bowl with his penchant for hauling cow bones up from the pastures so that he can gnaw on them in the front yard. The neat expanse of mowed grass these days resembles a charnel house floor, some of the bones comically large. Jinx prances across the yard with these bones clamped in his jaws, his head held high, his sharp-pointed tail curled across his spotted spine like a scythe.

The drive to work was on autopilot, which is the norm for me. Sometimes I think on this and realize the potential danger of driving all that distance through such varying terrain and population density with no thought nor memory of what I am doing with thousands of pounds of metal and glass. And though I have no memory of the drive, I am quite clear on where my mind was during that part of my morning. It was right there at our little farm.

Something I hear frequently from people is a comment to the effect that we’re living in crazy times, and this is true, and this is why my focus has unintentionally but unmistakably sharpened on what would call the small things of life. Recovering alcoholics like to recite a prayer in which they ask God to help them prioritize and act upon those things that are within and those things that are beyond their control. This is sensible. And for me, the portion of cornbread I eat and the amount of leeway I allow a spotted dog in cavorting with me in the twilight hours are sweet things that are important, and they are things I over which I can exercise some control.

My mind wanders back to this past Saturday…

Kicking along the gravel road, watching the hawks in the sky, noting the fast appearance of vetch in the culverts, I can almost believe that I am isolated from the sullen things of the world beyond my tiny parcel of acres. I know it’s an illusion, but my boots are solid on the honest road, and the dog zig-zags across my path, looking back at me frequently to make sure I’m there, and the barn swallows loop past me with their kamikaze tactics and pittering cries. Then later, sitting in the buttercups on one lip of the emerald bowl that is our little valley, watching two calves across on the far lip of the same bowl, kicking up their heels and playing, and then running pell-mell down the slope and tricking the adults into following suit only to find nothing down at the fence line except two calves with gleaming eyes, and I do believe those eyes show amusement at times. Jinx sits with me, his brown eyes dreamy as I scratch along his spine, my fingers raking in the coarse fur, stiff enough to holy-stone the deck of a frigate. When I stand to go to the house, he takes my index finger in his mouth and attempts to lead me. Because he wants to come inside, and I let him, and Dixee throws a wall-eyed fit of the purest jealousy, and Mrs. Orr is blessed because she acts as peacemaker and thus will be called a child of God.

Later in the evening, when I go out back to feed Harlan, the old barn cat, he comes to me across the clover and dances in place from paw to paw, his rusty soft voice grating in greeting, and he bends his head over his dish while I watch the Carolina wrens. They have taken up residence in the hanging gourd houses, and their song is like martial piccolos in the pinkish air of twilight. They watch me — I know they do. I scratch Harlan and look again to the gourds, then turn back to my own house and I like the way the golden light falls out of the windows onto the dark grass. Serenity is mine in that moment, and its sweetness stems from its elusiveness, and my legs feel heavy as I climb the slope back up to where I will go inside and fold myself before the pages of a weathered book.

I hold these moments inside myself, in the center of who I am. These moments hold me to my own life when I am forced to be away from the patch of land that I love, the land that holds my wife and me in its sweet-scented curve.

~ S.K. Orr