The Value of Moments

This morning, this gray and dripping morning, I walked in a neighbor’s corn field, thick-grown with silage for his cows. Except for the soft sighing in the tops of the trees in my woods behind me, the silence was deep and cyclical, like a tide, like a black spot in space between two stars. I stood in the chest-high corn plants and listened, and heard nothing but breeze, and I listened again, and inexplicably, a song came into my head, a song I have neither heard nor thought of in years.

I walked on through the corn and then at the perimeter found some bear scat. A calf watched me from the fenceline, and I wondered if he could smell the bear on the damp fronds of the edible and waving grasses. When I climbed back over the fence into my own acres, the calf still stood, his face crawling with flies in the moist air, his jaw working, his liquid eyes staring. He was the most alive thing in all of Creation at that moment, just before I left him there, just before I disappeared from his knowing and his (probably) short memory.

And I returned to our little home, where my loving wife would shortly prepare us a breakfast of waffles and sausage patties, which we ate while watching a documentary about an elderly Japanese country doctor and his warm relationship with his patients and villagers.

But before the breakfast, I sat and watched the birds in the backyard, and chuckled at the ill-tempered young male cardinal who fussed at any of the finches who alit on the feeder while he was tugging sunflower seeds out. Cardinals have some of the most expressive faces of all birds in my opinion, and this one seemed to be frowning as he hissed a “prrrrrrrr!” at any impudent interloper, scaring each away in turn while he breakfasted.

I became aware of Jinx and Bluebelle, who were alternately sitting at my feet and pacing the porch boards, watching for squirrels or the chance to charge the fence and scare a cow or two. Jinx and his diamond blaze on his head, his worried, forever beseeching eyes scanning my face to see my reactions and my moods. His thick, powerfully-muscled frame with the red paint-spatter of spots along his back and flank and haunches, the bowed legs, the questing snout, the broad chest, the sickle tail curled over his back. Bluebelle and her red and gray coat, darker and denser than her brother’s, the one eye circled in brown and gold and black and silver, the other staring out of her sharp-featured, vulpine face, her regular, nervous yawns and her insistent muzzle, forever rooting beneath my hand or arm, lifting it into the air so she can get just a little closer to me.

And I thought of Bonnie, whose grave I passed and whispered over while I was up in the woods, beautiful Bonnie with her laughing face and her sweeping tail, Bonnie dead these few years and even now melting back into the earth beneath the cairn I raised over her grave, feeding the living things near her, yet still trotting through the grasses of my memories and my longings and the moments that stitch together my days.

Yesterday, Mrs. Orr and I ran into a man with whom we used to attend church. He was more grizzled and moved more slowly, but he was the same old Ralph we remembered. And it was an odd and unsettling and unsatisfactory and awkward exchange we had, standing there in the meat department and gazing at each other, with long silences and boilerplate phrases being lobbed back and forth. I was aware that our only real connection had been the church in whose pews we had once perched, and I wanted to ask him if he still attended that church, but then I thought better of it because what if he asked me where we’re going to church, and I said Nowheresville, man? I was unwilling to give the man a tasty morsel of gossip to carry back to the clannish social circle in which he moves and lives. And so I shook his hand and we left him there, standing next to the coffin freezer with its bricks and tubes of ground beef and its planks of salmon and its apostrophes of lamb chops, and we may never see him again. People who once figured regularly in our lives pass out of our lives like water through a fish’s gills, left behind even though they once nourished us, after a fashion.

All these moments. All so fleeting and precious and curious and unutterable, like forgotten music that rises up unbidden in a quiet morning ramble.

~ S.K. Orr