Days Upon Days

The temperatures are so very mild here now…about 72F , sunny and mild, with rock-bottom humidity. The sensitive antennae of my bones tell me that winter will approach with more speed than I had anticipated. Mrs. Orr and I were talking recently about how we used to dread the hot weather — because in Texas, that’s really all we had — and how we welcomed the fall and winter months. Not no more, ese! The cold has an effect that it didn’t in our salad days, so there is a novel sense of dread now with the shifting sun patterns and the almost-chilly breeze. I am watching the hummingbirds closely, knowing that we have at most two weeks before they begin their migration to the southlands.

I walked in the back of the house this morning, my shoes skimming across the wet grass. I bent forward, partly because I am somewhat bent these days (like Robert Redford said in The Electric Horseman) and partly because I was watching the green blades closely as I disturbed them. Such a variety of earth-cover we have. I don’t think I ever embraced the immaculate Astroturfish lawns that came in vogue during my lifetime. I can still remember when grass seed boasted on the front of the sacks “Contains Clover!” as a selling point. People used to WANT clover in their lawns, and lordy, didn’t the pollinating crowd appreciate that?  We have so many varieties of grass on our property, it would take me a week to catalog them, to say  nothing of the mosses and ground covers (Japanese stiltweed, anyone?) and wildflowers. And over at the tomatoes, there drowsed an elderly bee on a volunteer sunflower, barely moving, absorbing the solar rays that have stroked his fuzzy back since the day he crept out into this world’s air. If he could have lifted his little legs and ran his little bee-hands through his bee-hair, he would have, I think. he would have nodded at me and offered a bee-smile and shrugged with his bee-shoulders and rasped, “Feels good, don’t it?”

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And before I forget, a Happy Birthday to the much-loved Jocelyn. Hang on, girl….it gets more interesting from here.

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A friend wrote me this weekend and described his Sunday trip to a Catholic monastery with a family member. He described with a smoldering accuracy how the holy area was defiled by so many who are clearly alien to the hushed hallways, the cold yet beautiful sculptures with their expressions of rapture and torment. We are a people displaced within our own time, and how can a state of grace exist in such befouled air? Who listens? Who watches? Who intercedes?

Forget intercession. I would be more than happy with some interference. But the skies are as silent as the woods just before daybreak. And all the paid experts tell me that the Powers don’t interfere. Strange situation.

Here’s today’s musical offering, courtesy of the always-interesting Billy Bob Thornton. Hope you enjoy the brooding tone.

~ S.K. Orr