Tuesday In Holy Week

My sister sent me happy news, an announcement that my nephew, her youngest child, will be getting married next month. She reports that he and his betrothed are happy with each other and ready to take this step. While I am genuinely happy for my nephew, I have mixed feelings about the situation. The world is different, as it always is, age to age. Marriage doesn’t mean what it once did, and among young people it seems to have taken on an aspect of gladiatorial combat. And the watching world is either ho-hum or avidly watching with gleaming eyes, not wanting to miss a single extraction of pain. I pray they may be sheltered from the sad spectacle of the world and what it will expect of the two of them. I pray they are ready for what will be waiting for them. But no one ever is. The lessons will be learned and the best advice — if it were to be offered — will be ignored or followed so selectively as to be neutered and moot.

***

I met an elderly man who told me something I’d never heard before. We were talking about the weather and such things, and I mentioned that my grandmother had planted and done projects by the signs. He liked that. He said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. If that yaller forsythia blooms out before Easter, we’ll get another snow.” I thought of the woods behind our home. Several patches of forsythia are up there, and all of it is as yellow as the nicotine stains on a Frenchman’s fingers.

Oh, and snow is forecast for Maundy Thursday. We’ll see. We’re in the middle of what the locals call redbud winter, and we still have to get through dogwood winter and blackberry winter. To everything there is a season.

***

Jinx is sleeping beside me as I write these words, his paws twitching as he runs across the dream fields. Sometimes I want to put on my jacket, grab my hat and cane, and set off across some of the fields in which we’ve never walked, just to explore and tramp the high grass until we’re so weary we have to stop and rest, and then tramp some more, and then turn for home and not make it back until dark. To spend an entire day without speaking a word, without having a single word spoken to me, and to be as content as I am when sitting here in my chair within the soft circle of lamplight, stealing glances at my wife as her eyes close and she begins the ritual of fighting sleep like a little girl. Perhaps she will run across the dream fields, and perhaps she will see someone familiar, and perhaps there will be breezes and clouds and hydrangea and buttered rolls. Perhaps she will tell me in the morning.

Jinx is running again, and I, awake and bound to my body, sit and keep watch. A small statue of the Blessed Virgin is on the table to my right, an object of subtle beauty. The shadows of her face and the folds of her robe are like calligraphy. The clock on the wall near her keeps time, a relentless metronome conducting me towards the darkest part of the night, and then on to the dawn of day. On to the dawn of day.

~ S.K. Orr