Late, Maundy Thursday

Jinx and I just went out into the back yard for his final restroom break of the night, and we were surprised to step out into snow. The porch and grass were covered in white powder, but it is clearing because the stars were shining down , one of the last of those cold, clear nights that I will miss when the weather finally warms and the air is less crisp, less sharply defined.

I think I’ve neglected to mention recently that I am growing potatoes this year. In old automobile tires. This is a technique I’ve heard about for years, one that has been recommended to me by many of the mountain elders here. There is a good supply of old tires up in the woods behind our house, and when I saw some seed potatoes for sale recently, I thought of the tires and shrugged. Why not?

Last night, I saw that there are four or five potato plants already poking up through the gravelly dirt in which I planted them, inside the first tire. Tonight, when I saw the snow, I realized that the forecast is for sub-freezing temperatures tonight and tomorrow night, so I covered them. Tire taters. I have high hopes.

This afternoon when I went out to my car at work, I saw something I didn’t recall ever seeing before. A female mockingbird was in the grassy median in the middle of the parking lot. She was plucking yellow tendrils from the middle of a dandelion flower and eating them. When I saw her, I thought she was harvesting an insect, but when I stopped and watched more closely, I saw what she was doing. There was a poetic delicacy to her actions, almost like a ritual, something that might appear nonsensical to another creature watching her, but something fraught with meaning and depth and import. Little gray feathered thing dipping her head and snapping up her dainties with methodical relish. Watch me, she seemed to say. Watch me and note my ways. Note them and remember them, but you will never understand them. Yes, that’s just so.

Maundy Thursday is melting away in the white-flecked darkness, and it will soon be Good Friday. The night in which He was betrayed. The hour of shadows. Brash Peter, soon to be shouted down by a Middle Eastern rooster. The immaculate Lady, separated from her Son by despicable men with regicide in their hearts and consigned to let the tears cut tracks down her delicate cheeks while the respectable ones had their way with her only Son. And Judas, with his scalded lips, his fingers not nearly as skilled at counting coins as they were at tying nooses. Our blessed Lord, abducted from a garden and soon to be groaning upon Golgotha, his mockers’ spittle drying on His bloody skin while the sky stared down at Him, and He prayed up into it, and the iron ruined His flesh and a gifted grave yawned down there in the other garden, waiting to swallow Him for a Jonah’s-worth of time.

~ S.K. Orr