Wanderings, Wonderings

There’s a certain liquid but frictioned struggle when I walk through the grass in the morning after it rains. My feet, less sure now, more prone to missteps and the cruelty of unbalancing, skim through the green sea of clover and vetch, leaving long strokes like ski tracks behind me. But I do not turn to look at these tracks as I walk, because I do not trust my own footfalls. This, then,  is what aging is: a gradual mistrust of all the powers and agile techniques and reflexive movements that I once took for granted, like a good Catholic who, when he sees death’s cowled head bobbing up over the western hill and growing nearer, begins to look differently at his rosary and the sore spots on his knees and the smudges of candleflame and incense smoke on the ceiling above his private altar and wonder, with quiet and furtive guilt, if his rites and rituals have been like water spilled on west Texas caliche in August. I am not a good Catholic. I have never been a good anything, except perhaps a naturally skilled battler and an instinctive lover of natural beauty. But the warlike days are over, and the eyes grow dim.

But still I set out on my little walks, straining all the colors and textures and scents of the morning air like a baleen whale sieves out his plankton, feeding on these sensations and stimuli, finding nourishment in those things that seem almost invisible to some. To be able to see beauty is a gift, and I never take the gift for granted.  I can weep in the presence of such art. I can walk in the fields and pause at a milkweed stalk, completely enchanted not just by the beauty of the little trumpetlike blossoms, but by the beetle hanging upon them, moving with his good work ethic, singing his own song as he goes about his Sunday.

And among my garden plots, I can marvel at beetle, ant, and grasshopper as they clamber across the glossy and veined surfaces of the purple hull pea plants, looking for the tiny morsels that sate them while I watch for the blossoms and then finally the pods that will fill a pot and a plate, moving from the garden to the kitchen to the pool of butter, and perhaps there will be hot-water cornbread and sweet, sweet tea.

The day was oppressively humid, very much like the Augusts I once knew in my southern, delta-drawn youth, like the too-brief years in Japan, a sodden woolen cloth hanging above the moving creatures, blocking breeze and refreshment, holding my never-to-be-spoken prayers close to the busy earth. The mountains seemed to be following my example, looking up, looking to all four points of the compass, waiting, listening, feeling the weight of the unseen sun and hoping for the stirring of the breeze across their emerald humps.

And then back at the garden, the stubby, knobby pickling cucumbers, bullet-sized and almost free of their papery blossoms, ready to stretch and lengthen and grow into something sweet that can be plucked and washed and bitten in half, enjoyed with salt or dressing, giving themselves up to the summer’s crunching appetites, restless and climbing, visited by bee and aphid and spider, reaching up and listening, listening as vegetables do listen.

Ah, look. Look at that immaculate star in the middle of the Rose of Sharon blossom, daubed with the scarlet ink that spreads across the petals as it would across the surface of a good sketch pad. So often, perfection is found in a flower or a blossom or a bud. And sometimes, in a dead and drifting leaf, used up and returning to whence it came. But for today, this blood-framed star blossom with the biblical name is enough. It is the perfection of this day.

Our nearest neighbor recently got rid of two small chicken coops and built a new one from a storage barn, swanky for poultry and convenient for those who gather the cackleberries. I walked by one of the discarded ones today and saw a lone egg and a solitary feather inside on the linoleum floor. There was something poignant about the image, but not sad. Not sad because the hens who once clucked and bobbed through this coop are now living the life of Riley. Good for them.

Mrs. Orr’s limelight hydrangeas, which I was supposed to have uprooted and carted away back last fall due to their enormous and invasive height, remain outside of the dining room window. They do provide good shade from the traveling sun, and I enjoy the fish-scale pattern of their petals. Who knows if they will survive the coming autumn and the reconstruction upon which I hope to embark in the yard?

My neighbor’s farm equipment has a forlorn look these days, sitting in the field and perhaps dreaming of its younger, more oiled and efficient days. The crows like to perch on it in the mornings and at dusk, and if machines have any sentience to them — and why not? Are they not composed of the elements of the earth in various forms, therefore tied to whatever hand painted all of this into being? — I imagine they sit and think of useful employment and the cooling off of hot parts that were used to slice and scoop and shear and rake, and perhaps they watch the mountains that are watching them. I don’t know. But I know what I like to think.

It’s difficult to think on the fact that the hummingbirds, who have been so ferociously active this week, will, in just about eight weeks, be leaving our acres and speeding down to a more southerly continent. They are such good company, particularly the gentle females who soar within inches of our faces while we sit out on the back porch and read. They are precision artists, every action a pristine poem, every squeak a cantata, every arc over the yard a major theatrical production. And how we love them. How we enjoy them.

How we envy them, as we envy all birds, especially those who surf on thermals above us and perch on the wires and the high, swaying branches, watching with their remarkable eyes. Singing their songs. Filling their tiny lungs with the same southern air I pull into my own.

I’m a damn fool if I don’t revel in these things, or if I take any of them for granted.  I have taken many things for granted through the decades, things like surefootedness and flexibility and endurance and confidence in what the future cups in its hands. Taking something for granted is one way of ensuring that “something” will be removed before its absence is noted. Are these “somethings” stored somewhere in the far-off places, and might they be retrieved and dusted off and used once again in the numberless ages to come? If those ages do come?

And so we start the second week of August. Where does the time go?

~ S.K. Orr