Free Stu Scheller!

When Jinx and I stepped outside Sunday morning into the mist, I saw a funnel spider’s web in the grass. It was one of the larger ones I’ve seen in a while, big as a plate and perfectly situated. I knelt down as best I could in the grass and examined the structure. How many hours did it take to build? How successful was it in trapping food for its builder? All those little struts and girders and beams and buttresses and studs and strips and joists…all from the body of the one who erected it and then retreated back into the funnel to await that trembling signal of live prey in the trap. A work of wonder.

***

The Marine Corps was a huge part of my life. Still is, in fact, though I haven’t worn the uniform in nearly forty years. And my beloved Corps is in disgrace tonight. Not only has her Commandant sided with and abetted the sinister, oyster-eyed Army general named Mark Milley, but she has arrested and jailed a highly-decorated combat commander for the sin of publicly asking for accountability from the leaders who have betrayed those who bear arms for this once-decent country. Lt. Col Stu Scheller is sleeping in a Marine Corps brig tonight, separated from his wife and children, stripped of his command, robbed of his career and pension, looking forward to a possible court martial and more imprisonment. This situation is obscene, and it cries to heaven for redress. Please pray for Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller, USMC, and for his family, as he endures the cruel blows of the gutless “leaders” who hold his life in their dirty hands.

***

I love the quiet of the cool months, but the quiet is unsettling around the hummingbird feeders. The little things have left us for the year, it seems. I put fresh sugar water in the feeders the other day, and I will leave them out until the first frost, just in case any late stragglers pass through the area and need refreshment. But “our” hummingbirds are gone until the spring.

And it’s an odd feeling, to realize that it is a physical fact that those same little jeweled bodies who flitted through the air here at our farm for months are now down in South America somewhere, feeding on exotic tropical flowers and passing their days in a place I have never seen and never will see. It is akin to thinking on dead family and friends…they have traveled to a place I have never seen and will never see in this life. They are real; they are not abstract. They are living beings; they are not concepts. “They” being both the hummingbirds and the deceased loved ones. If I live to see another spring, I will feel resurrected when I see that first flash of a little green body at the red plastic feeder in the backyard.

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I have some more things to say, but my body and my mind are both weary. And so I will ask God’s blessings on each of you, my readers, and will ask you again to pray for Lt. Col. Scheller.

~ S.K. Orr