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Last Week Of Spring
Dog in my rear-view His stare pleads with me to stay But he will wait there. Black cows belly deep In the jade-surfaced stock pond Comfort found, taken. Deer leaps in my path Legs trembling, eyes beseeching Go romp one more day. ~ S.K. Orr
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Purpose
I have watched, and am become as a sparrow all alone on the housetop. — Psalm 102:7 (Douay-Rheims Version) Last night at twilight, a large woodpecker lighted on the utility pole in the back yard. He made a few desultory taps on the treated wood, then scurried to the top and sat there, looking around, his magnificent head a flash of color in the ebbing light of a day that was on the edge of slipping into the past forever. The bird began to sing, the sound an exotic, quasi-tropical series of notes as staccato as the ones his beak made in the weathered fibers of the pole. Ten to…
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A Season
The day has been remarkably cool and breezy, the middle of June but feeling more like early October. This morning, I stood in the parking lot at work and drank in the sight of a rainbow that seemed to stretch from one end of town to the other. The center of the bow was obscured by a charcoal-and-pink cloud that looked like the smoke from a cursed city afire. I watched the clouds and procrastinated entering my building, and I wondered what other symbols of goodness and blessing will be hijacked for unsavory causes and purposes. This past Saturday marked three months since Jinx came to live at the farm.…
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Respite From Madness
While all the madness swirls around us, let me encourage you to support something truly worthwhile, as opposed to the false and foolish trash one encounters in the world. Here is a modest documentary in production that could use the help of people who have not succumbed to ClownWorld, Inc. The documentary focuses on the plight of small ranchers in the USA. As someone noted, the people featured in the documentary and the people producing it are not the sort who will bend the knee to nor wash the feet of degenerate agitators. They are more worthy of your support than any sports team or network streaming service or woke…
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Day Of Sighs
I drove to work, almost able to see the miasma of lies and evil hanging like summer fog in the air through which I moved. Natural beauty almost always lifts me out of myself and helps me forget the ugliness within and without, but yesterday, I could feel it affecting me, entering my spirit’s lungs, sickening me. Arriving at my office and parking in my usual spot beneath the tree, I did not want to leave the shelter of my vehicle, did not want to cross that parking lot, did not want to enter that building where profit is king and spiritual realities are, at best, sneer-fodder. I wanted to…
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For Craig
Alas, I was not able to get a picture of Jinx returning home with his trophy. But here is one of him with some of the many charnel-house prizes he drags home on a regular basis. Just today, Mrs. Orr had to wrestle away from him an enormous swath of plastic netting, the kind used to wrap round hay bales. One of our farmer neighbors had stripped the netting from a bale and left it near his silage pit just down the road. Jinx had it stretched all the way down the driveway when my wife saw what was going on. I’m trying to teach him to seek and bring…
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A Jinxotic Interlude
Our nearest neighbor recently acquired a puppy who just happens to be about the same age as Jinx. He was supposed to be a basset hound, but turns out that he’s a basset/lab mix, as black as any lump of coal ever mined in these hills, low to the ground, sturdy as a sack of cement, ears down to yar, hilarious gait. He came a’callin’ the other evening, having escaped the confines of his own fenced yard. Jinx and I were sitting outside, enjoying the breeze in the shade, watching the birds. I was half-reading, absently scratching his ears while he sat beside me, leaning against my chair, the one…
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Eyes Without A Face
On the drive to work, the approach of summer announced itself with the early bright sky. I am still pleased with how clear the skies are these days. Ever since this manufactured worldwide crisis began, the murky web of vapor trails in the sky has been almost completely nonexistent. To my eyes, the sky seems bigger, clearer, realer. Even at night, the effect seems pronounced, with the stars appearing nearer and more…present with me. When I arrived at work after a week away, the tree beneath which I park seemed fuller and lusher, its purplish leaves nodding in the morning breeze. I touched my cheek to one of the leaves…
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Reliable Light
It’s a curious thing, a purely human situation, to propose to accomplish something and to saturate the attempt with prayer and focus and keen energy….and then to have the door slammed in one’s face and the word “NO!” shouted into one’s ear with the terrible power of God’s own acoustics. My wife and I are sitting in our little farmhouse as the dark covers the grassy acres outside. We are stunned with the rapidity with which all the things we had hoped for in this past week fell apart and melted into nothingness. I don’t think we have given into despair, but it feels like despair. Disappointment and disillusionment and…