Reflections
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Seasons Of Life
Things have shifted, and now I am detaching from some things and moving towards some new ones. A time of nervous stomachs and pleasant anticipation, a period of feeling overwhelmed and unprepared, a stretch of unsettled hours, of feeling my age, of pushing out again into the waters of hope, watching the clouds and the horizon. It’s lighter in the mornings now, and I see the bicyclist on the shoulder of the road each day on the way to work. I lift my hand and breathe a blessing and a prayer, and as always, I wonder where he is going and what he does and how his day and his…
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I Want To
In the drowsy fine warm air of noon, a memory came to me. . These impressionist images from my maybe-it-happened mind come to me regularly, because my past is as efficient and wondrously tenacious as the manner in which plants distribute their seeds. The images and memories stick like burrs, or they float on easterly breezes, or they are carried by birds and dropped into the grassy expanse of my moments. What I remembered — and I invite you to search for a similar fragment in your own mind— was what it was like to mount my bike when I had neither Adams apple nor beard nor a hunger to…
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Days Of Fog
When I left the house this morning, my wife was standing at the door and waving, and Jinx was on the porch watching me. The morning was foggy, and the deer were active. One ran across the road in front of me when I was barely out of sight of the house, and between there and my office, I passed at least ten. Sleek, regal, liquid-eyed, and dainty-legged, they each looked at me as I went past them, unaware that I was praying for their safety. Or were they? Who can say? I passed the bicyclist I see most mornings, and I lifted my hand and blessed him and whispered…
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Cold Spring Water
I received word of the death of a friend. He was a genuine old-timey mountain man, and a moonshiner deluxe. Like the legendary Popcorn Sutton (pictured above), my friend moved easily among the hills and hollers of this region, fashioning well-crafted stills and firing them with wood he cut himself, filling them with clear, cold spring water that trickled through the cuts and valleys beneath stands of oak and rhododendron. Unlike Mr. Sutton, my friend owned and ran a respectable business and his moonshining was strictly a side venture. He was a master at distilling corn down into the potent clear liquid that so many have savored. Who can number…
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The Twelfth Of Ever
We slept in our recliners again last night, and it was a good sleep, as soundless and swaying as if we had been in the depths of the salty sea. Good until 1:30 AM, that is. That was the hour Jinx decided to say hello to his cousins, the coyotes, who were up on the far ridge singing their aria to the open face of the moon. He was right under the windows behind us, and he chuffed one short bark, then lifted his voice in a baritone howl that lasted a good quarter of a minute. I sat up and felt the atavistic hair on the back of my…
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The Strange Power
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” ― Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses Yesterday marked six months to the day that our beloved dog, Bonnie, died in her sleep. I don’t ponder it as much as I once did, but each time I remember the moment that I realized Bonnie was gone, I feel as if I have been kicked in the stomach. The sense of her being stolen from us is as raw and punishing as it was half a year ago. My grief for my dog caught me by surprise. I never expected to mourn an animal the way I did Bonnie.…
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The Burial of Francis Berger’s Why
Francis Berger, the international writer, philosopher, and blogger who lives in Hungary is a friend of mine. I have never met the man, never spoken with him on the phone, and he has never (yet) bailed me out of jail. But he is my friend, and I say this because he fulfills the criteria for that term, and because I have considerable respect and even affection for this distant man. I have no idea whether Francis considers me a friend or not, and even if he showed up at my farm and told me that he does not consider me his friend, it wouldn’t change a blankety-blank thing. That’s the…
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Cold’s End
And it came to pass that yesterday was a chilly but gorgeous day, and I was as a stranger unto my wife, for I spent long hours of the day outside with the red-spotted dog, starting with a long walk just as the sun was peeking up over the eastern ridge of the Clinch Mountains. Mid-morning, I took Jinx for a ride to the county trash dump. He still has considerable fear of riding in vehicles, but I’ve learned not to try and coax him inside. The cajoling only makes him more skittish. So I just opened the door in advance, and went and got all the trash I was…
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To Sit, To Dwell
I can still see her sitting there. Unless the day was quite cold, my grandmother did a fair share of her daily work sitting in the battered rocking chair on her front porch. Many’s the time I’ve seen her with a pan of peas or beans on her lap, her gnarled fingers selecting and snapping and dropping. Or with a garment that needed mending, her gray head bent over the fabric as she guided the needle through its proper places. Or with her Reader’s Digest Condensed Bible with its worn, pillowed green cover, open on her aproned lap, bookmarked with newspaper clippings (mostly obituaries) and leaves and pressed wildflowers. But…
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The Adolescence Of The Season
We slept in our recliners last night, and other than a bit of tossy-turnyness, it wasn’t a bad night’s sleep. When we awakened, I found that it had gone chilly overnight. Rain is supposed to move in again later today, and the next few days the temperatures will drop a bit, with frost a possibility. Spring in this region is a sort of seasonal adolescence. Unsettled and mercurial, with expected patterns and routines suddenly tumped-over by exciting or terrifying changes, then calming back down to a slow flow. This makes the days seem shorter, the evening skies more dramatic after the cloud sprites have had at the heavens with their…