The Epiphany of the Lord

While on our daybreak walk this morning, Jinx and I watched two men setting up chairs under the tent at the newly-opened grave in the little country graveyard. The spotted menace seems to take a special interest in the craft of the sexton; I was grateful he didn’t leap onto the tarp covering the grave. This time.

The wind was chilly and brisk but not unbearable…about 43F. The clouds moved like a flock of sheep across the sky, low and swift and wooly, and the tang of silage came to me when I turned into the wind. As I walked, watching Jinx gallop in one of the pastures, I engaged in the ritual of blessing-counting, one of the most helpful and revivifying things I do in my life. By the time we returned to the house, I hadn’t even begun to explore the list that goes on and on and on, like the winds circling this green earth.

When I opened my eyes this morning in the dark, I didn’t look over at an empty side of the bed and have to wonder where my wife was or why she would betray me; many men awakened this morning to just that thought. When I came awake, I heard my wife breathing softly, and I heard Jinx snoring in his soft bed on the floor. I did not awaken to the beeps of hospital monitors, or to the too-chirpy voice of some bossy, apathetic nurse telling me that it was time to get on the bedpan.

When I put on my clothes, I wasn’t doing so in a prison cell, donning the same garb as the prisoner in the gray cell with me. When I stepped outside, I didn’t find myself on a concrete slab, listening to traffic and sirens, enduring the hateful and envious stares of predatory people on the street. I walked down my driveway; I was not wheeled down it in a chair, pushed along by a paid caretaker. When I looked to the east to see if the sun might be seen behind the clouds, I wasn’t counting down to my next bout of chemotherapy. When I made my way past the cemetery, I wasn’t mentally rechecking the list of things to do before my wife’s funeral that afternoon. When I returned home, I was greeted with the aroma of coffee, not the smell of urine-soaked hallways and garbage. When my wife looked at me in the kitchen, I could see love in her eyes; I did not see spite or resentment or disdain.

While typing these words, I am not puffing on a straw or blinking at a sensor-screen. I am sitting in a comfortable chair, not a wheelchair, and when I stand up, no guard will bark orders at me, and no rats will scurry across my floor, and my stomach is not pinched with hunger and my nose is not numb with cold and my mind is not addled with psychotropic medications and my day is not structured and regimented by someone who wields clipboard and badge with hateful arrogance.

I am grateful for the day, for my life, for my numberless blessings, for the graces I have been given, for the awareness of all these things. I am grateful for the upside-down nuthatches in the backyard, and for hot showers, and for fried eggs, and for firewood on the hearth, and for the love of reading and the time to read and marriage to a book-lover, and for the little oak seedling in the spare bedroom, grown from an acorn I picked up on one of my walks with Jinx, and I am grateful for the unharsh clouds, and for a covered front porch, and for wool socks and chainsaws and reading glasses that cost a dollar and old white-faced squirrels that have lived here at the farm for years and for the plant that climbs up the kitchen wall and for good soft pencils and for bibles and missals and prayer books and incense and icons and crucifixes and feast days and the cool rosary beads under the pads of my fingers. I am grateful for letters from loved ones and friends. I am grateful for yawns that hurt my jaws and stretches that give me charley-horses. I am grateful for the sensation of the presence of the One Who put me here and Who will one day call me back to that place where I started.

I am a grateful man.

~ S.K. Orr