Dogwood Winter

The sunny, balmy weather of the past week has yielded to a cold rain with the threat of some snow mixed in today, and freezing temperatures for the next two nights. This means I will be draping old bedsheets and towels across Mrs. Orr’s flowers in the front garden, and bringing in the basketed ones hanging on the front and back porches. Our dogwoods have finally come into their full strength, which makes this cold snap the Dogwood Winter. The blackberry canes surrounding our farm have started to bud a bit, and the next cold snap should be right about the time they bloom out. That will be Blackberry Winter, and almost always heralds the end of cold weather and the settling in of warmer temperatures. The pattern doesn’t always hold; we’ve had snow in early May in the past a couple of times. But it’s a good general rule. Once mid-may has passed, then we will plant vegetables. The potatoes are already down and growing, but they are safe from the cold.

Jinx is housebound today, and I don’t think he’s particularly perturbed about it. He’s wise enough to gaze out the window and see the gray, scuttling clouds sending down the diagonal needles of rain and to know that he’s better off in his sheepskin-lined bed in a warm house.

If he’s not wise, Jinx does a fair enough act of it to make me believe in his innate wisdom. Like all animals, he makes the most of every day. From his first ear-splitting yawns in the pre-dawn darkness to his final circling of his bedding and hitching that mighty sigh that signals his descent into sleep each night, he receives the flowing moments as gifts, and he unwraps them and uses them until he’s wrung every drop of joy from them. He appreciates every gesture of affection, and he forgives each slight and each incidence of my unintentional neglect with a full immediacy that my spirit envies.

I have to commend an essay Laura Wood published recently, “A Sunday Visit With Friends.” It’s a sweet and enjoyable essay, and it contained a 1939 quote from Vita Sackville-West that I’ve been thinking of all morning.

“It gives a peculiar sense of intimacy with nature to realize that your presence is accepted without fear by the small and vulnerable creatures of bank and wood and to watch them going unalarmed about their normal business.”  [V. Sackville-West, Country Notes, Michael Joseph Ltd., London, 1939, p. 141]

Isn’t that just the truth? I venture up into our woods every chance I get, and I often find a rock or a log to sit on, a vantage point from which I can watch and watch and listen and listen. Just being still for ten minutes can provide remarkable pleasure, because the animals quickly grow accustomed to my presence, and they resume their regular activities within my sphere of observation. There is something holy — intimate, as Sackville-West put it — about these opportunities to watch and listen. To be accepted as part of their natural landscape. Could it be that they enjoy my presence to some small degree? This is too much for me to hope for, but it is a lovely thought. I never spend time outdoors without walking back into the house carrying with me a sense of having been touched by something heavenly, something from the world beyond.

And I feel the same many times when I spend long, silent hours with Jinx. He drapes himself across my lap or my chest and enters his sleep-world as quickly and as trustingly as a child. But unlike a child, I have Jinx entire right now, until the end of his days with me. He will not grow worldly nor jaded. He will not be ashamed to be seen with me when his friends are nearby. He will not see me as an embarrassment. Our rituals will never become tiresome to him. He enjoys me fully because he wants to enjoy me fully. When I sit in my chair and feel his spotted weight pressing down on me, I feel joined to something beyond myself, something that I am glad is a mystery and will remain so.

The natural world with its rhythms are a source of daily delight to me. God grant that I can sometimes glimpse my days with the fulness of joy that Jinx sees every minute of every one of his days.

~ S.K. Orr