Down In The Dirt

Saturday was supposed to be a home day, a day of chores and catching up on rest and spending time with Mrs. Orr and sporting with Jinx. But a small possum made shreds of my plans and I had to spend much of the day undoing his damage, along with trips to town to obtain the needed materials for the repair job. So the hours unspooled and we found ourselves in stores and we found ourselves in a restaurant, and we found ourselves watching people and wincing at what they wore, how they spoke, how they acted. We were relieved when we found ourselves back on our road, greeted at the long driveway by a spotted dog, away from the press of the rude and the impatient and the unseemly, away from the sticky tendrils of a lost society, sequestered once again in our few acres and the quiet joy the farm gives so liberally to us.

The second half of the day was spent on the back porch, with old-timey music soft in the air and fans aimed at our legs, reading and talking, my wife plowing through crossword puzzles, the dogs arguing and cavorting, the birds diving and calling and hunting, the two old folks nibbling on uncured ham and pickles,

The birds, We had replenished the feeders earlier with sunflower seeds for the songbirds and suet cakes for the woodpeckers. I looked up from a chapter, my ear alerting me to something on one of the wire mesh feeders. A sleek chipmunk was emerging from the inside of the feeder, squeezing out from under the more-or-less clamped lid, cheeks packed with black oil sunflower seed. Mrs. Orr had already named the chipmunk Theodore. She shares a bond with the little critters with their fancy racing stripes ever since she rescued one from drowning a few years ago. Theodore sped down the shepherd’s crook pole and vanished into the honeysuckle at the bottom. In a few minutes, he reappeared, ran up the pole, nosed the lid up, and dived in again. He kept this up for the better part of an hour. At one point, I got his photo while he rested, cross-legged, on the shepherd’s crook. And I learned something. Chipmunks really can show smugness in their faces.

We also watched a plump little rabbit foraging in the yard among the robins. Silvertape, I called him. I got a few photos of him as well, but after I had returned my camera to the house, the best photo opportunity slipped by without any documentation. Silvertape and Theodore played together for a good two minutes or so, chasing each other around the grass, hopping and skittering and putting on a good show. It was clear to us that they really were playing, and that they knew what they were doing.

But that evening, on a walk with Jinx, and in the cool mist of Sunday morning, I kicked along the gravel lane and watched and listened and felt mildly drugged with the power of it all, the force of life and its fast fierce players before me. The bird-stabbed air, blanketing the barn swallows as they wheeled and sliced, magnifying their calls and giving a glint to the color of their feathers, and the humped and feeding cows on the grass beneath them, inching across the vital turf, dropping their piles of manure, the birds soon to claw through it in search of treasure, their hooves sinking into the rich sod, leaving their U’s pressed into it.  Laughing at Jinx and his gunslinger gait, hips rolling with his slightly pigeon-toed stride, snapping at errant bees and grinning at me when I talked to him, getting my jokes and appreciating my grasp of literature and economics and agriculture. We strolled together, his tail curved up over his back, my hand curled on my cane, the vapor trails so far away curling into boiled lines with whatever they’re spraying, the air hissing with insects and sun-power, the gravel becoming known to me, small rocks that might have once been boulders, thumbprints of glaciers that once crawled through the fingers and draws of the valley, pressing and crushing and cutting the features of the land itself, my boots rattling in the gravel, kicking up plumes of Adam’s distant origin, puffs of serpent’s wages, thinking of the copperhead I killed the day before and the garter snake that threw himself and his energies into his escape from the mower’s blades. The hawks high above me, probably able to read the dial on the watch on my wrist, and the ticks in the tall grass, hoping to hitch a ride on the spotted dog, and the mice in the silage, like the one who peeked up at me from the well of the windshield while I drove to work on Friday, doubtless perplexed at how he ended up so far from his home meadow and now marooned in a sea of asphalt and stripes and signals and mechanical screeches. The marching fence, hosting its birds and the dewdrops on its skeleton, marking out its boundaries and its doctrines, relentless as a sonnet, and rhythmic, too, and fickle and post-bound and bored with the straight stretches, the way Thursdays and celebrities bore me. The necklace of wild roses about the neck of a shrub I don’t know, gazing with their petaled faces at the southwest, whispering about the bears and the coyotes who shoulder past them in the early dark, and the power lines above, running their humming races with the lanes and the borders and the invisible creatures who live and live and live  between and above all these things, and I saw it all, took it all in, and made it my own.

I knelt later in the dirt, down in the dirt, God down there with me, looking up at me with eyes brimming with good will and creative love, God down there in the folds of loam, held down with paperweight rocks, threaded through with praise-worthy earthworms, holding His hands up, always up, bidding me come and look. And I did, again and again.

Then later, pressed into a soft chair with my chin stabbing my chest and my book sliding off into the floor, I heard their whispers, heard their cries and their promises, these demanding visual moments and auditory seconds, the time of what parades before me, hard and glistening and worthy, and I went into the land of sleep and I did not return for some time, but while I was away, all these things remained and moved and sensed, and the dog slept near me, stretched and worn and quiet, his rough pads and short nails waving like the irises and the chicory lining the road that leads me to home when I am done with the world of noise and returning to the world of sound and cry and call and vibration.

All these things are mine, and I own none of them. All of these things are mysteries, and my understanding of them is full and wonderful.

~ S.K. Orr