- Bluebelle, Books, Daily Life, Holy Days, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Jinx, Photographs, Reflections
Lent’s Edge
Surprising to step out on a day like today and pull warm air into the lungs and feel the spongy earth beneath the boots and listen to the disagreements and opinions of two hundred of birds at least and to walk to the weeping willow and pull a strand to the face and see up close the little lettuce leaf buds dotted along the limb, the limb slender and useful as a pencil lead, the limb pliable but cold still, drooping towards the warming earth, conserving its energy, gathering its strength, biding its time, talking to itself as I do when I walk in the fields. Surprising it is. Yes.…
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Plank Beneath My Feet
One of the categories for this blog is “I Never Thought I’d Be In This Situation.” This is how I feel tonight, because I, the cold weather-loving man, have reached the point where I said to Mrs. Orr, “I am tired of wearing all these layers of clothes. I am tired of hurting because of the weather. I’m tired of winter. I’m looking forward to the springtime. I’m looking forward to being warm again. And these are all true statements. How did I come to this point? I don’t know. I know that once the sun swings around and the earth warms and I hear the noise and busyness of…
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Endings And Beginnings
At 458 pm on Tuesday, I walked into the office manager’s lair and said, “Think fast!” She looked up and I tossed my keys at her, underhanded. She moved pretty adroitly for an obese diabolical narcissist, and she caught the keys. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “Good luck.” I didn’t say a word to her. Walked out and was met by one of my coworkers, who embraced me and told me she was going to miss me. Then I walked out to the lobby where two more coworkers were busy and said, “Girls? Adios.” They both turned to me, and one of them said, “Good luck.” The other walked towards…
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Easing Into Septuagesimatide
The world outside is measured in gradations of russet. It snowed during the night and I was surprised when I looked outside this morning and saw the white expanse. The heeler twins enjoyed their romps in the stuff until mid-day, when the staring sun and the resultant rising temps did away with all of it. And now what remains is a stretch of pine needles and cones atop the soggy ground, beneath the leafless trees and the lichen-covered fence posts, and the sun is easing down in the west, and all is muted and brownish and earthy. Gradations of russet. The color of oxidation, of disuse. And all things will…
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In Dour Country
Well, I got it, too. On Friday, I developed chills and that head-swaying dizziness that I’ve experienced several times in the past with the flu. Cycles of fever started right after these symptoms. I took a home test Saturday morning and got the captain’s bars of a positive result. As people used to say a few years back, meh. Mrs. Orr is feeling better, fever-free and cough almost completely gone. Her remaining complaint is the soreness of her eyeballs, which she often gets after running a fever. That and fatigue. We’re continuing our Ivermectin/antibiotic/vitamin supplementation and I do believe this regimen has been responsible for minimizing the effects of the…
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Coof Positive
My beloved wife has the Covid. She’s positive for the ‘Rona. She has been stricken with The Chinese Lung Aids (hat tip to Ann Barnhardt for that little phrase). She all eat up wif de Coof. She’s been smitten with the Birdemic. She’s been assaulted by the Kung Flu, laid low by the Chyna Vyrus. She developed a fever last night and was very achey and flu-ish. We did a home test that we’d been given and we got the positive result in 10 minutes. The main concern has been chest congestion, which is the one thing that truly causes her distress. We’ve been treating her with Ivermectin (again, thanks,…
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Honing The Edge of Loss
These are days of depletion, of withered hopes, of long hours, of loss. That feeling that the little ship inside me has run onto a jagged shoal and now there is a little slick of acid growing in the waters around it. I have been interviewing for a new job, and have been quite hopeful that I was going to get it. But because of some remarkable bureaucracy jiggles and inflexibility, the moment has passed and I did not get the job. I made the mistake of allowing myself to believe that I was going to be awarded the position, and that belief lightened my mood at work and made…
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A Choir of Seabirds
The cold here is deep and milky, with probing fingers and breath on the back of my neck. The quiet has settled in at our little farm, and the flames are waltzing behind the glass in the stove, and I, I alone, am awake in this room, this room lit only by those flames. When I arrived at work, my crows were standing in a line so straight, they looked like decorations in a shop. They burbled at me in soft voices as I walked past them, sprinkling crackers across the striped and oil-stained asphalt. Later, when I came out to sit in the back seat and eat my lunch…
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The Chamber of Loneliness
I was born into this world with certain things intact. The color of my skin, my eyes, my hair. The size and proportion of my skeletal frame. A certain personality and a particular temperament. Specific and focused interests. A drive towards thinking about and seeking to fully experience the spiritual, the transcendent. Like all sons of Adam, my life has been a scattered path of trying to make sense of the damage that occurs when my interests and desires have not dovetailed with my abilities and personality. For example, I was born with some musical talent and the ability to write competently, but neither of these artistic areas ever led…
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Son Of There
I know what it means to be Southern. This is an entirely different thing than knowing that I am Southern, or identifying as Southern. I am Southern, and I potently, self-consciously know what this means. It is as much a part of me as my blood type or the patterns of the veins on the backs of my hands. Because I live deliberately in the South, I daily knock up against the distinctions between myself and other men who were born and raised and still live down here. My distinctions are etched by the experiences of traveling and living abroad when I was a young man. The things I saw,…