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Mourning Becomes Advent
As the Christmas season approaches, I find that I am filled with a low-grade dread. While Christmastime was once a wonderous time for me, the degradation of the world in my lifetime has brought me to a place where I pretty much despise this time of year. I have no new observations to offer; many people already roundly denounce the commercialization of the season in which we celebrate the birth of Christ. It has become a filthy, tawdry, grasping, shoving time, a time in which people stand outside shopping centers and ring a bell for a now-flaccid organization whose focus is hateful and ridiculous to many of the bell-ringers themselves.…
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No Rest
The heartbreak of seeing your grandsons incarcerated God offers to every man the choice between truth and repose. Take which you will, you can never have both. — Ralph Waldo Emerson One of the quotidian pleasures Mrs. Orr and I enjoy is working crossword puzzles. We haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in many years, but a friend does, and Mrs. Orr will often bring home copies of the puzzle from the paper. It’s a pleasurable way to unwind in the evening or in the mornings while trying to clear the cobwebs from the head. Mrs. Orr enjoys working the crossword while she’s cooking. Lately, our pleasure in the puzzles has…
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To Roam Through The New Earth
Heeding the news or pundits or bloggers about what’s going on in the world is like listening to preachers expound on the book of Revelation. None of them really knows what he’s talking about. It’s naïve speculation at best, and cynical self-centered grandstanding at worst. I grew up listening to sermons and skimming booklets that “proved” that Richard Nixon was the Beast, or that Henry Kissinger was the antichrist. And where are those authors now? Look at the current crop of blathering boys & girls, ignorant of both history and human nature, standing atop their picnic tables and waving their arms about. They, too, will be completely forgotten someday. Any…
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Something That Will Not Rest
I have been a foolish, greedy, and ignorant man; Yet I have had my time beneath the sun and stars; I have known the returning strength and sweetness of the seasons, Blossom on the branch and the ripening of fruit, The deep rest of the grass, the salt of the sea, The frozen ecstasy of mountains. The earth is nobler than the world we have built upon it; The earth is long-suffering, solid, fruitful; The world is still shifting, dark, half-evil. But what have I done that I should have a better world, Even though there is in me something that will not rest Until it sees Paradise…? Johnson in…
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East Again
It’s a funny thing, how fast everything moves in this world, and how that existential speed can disorient us. A week and a half ago, we got into a box of metal and steel, and we sat in it all day and part of the night, and when we got out of the box, we were in another country. We were in Texas, and how did that happen? It’s also a funny thing how different people can be in different regions of the same country. When we go home to Texas to visit, we’re always struck with how different the people are from the people we live around now. We’re…
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Lower Voices
Lower Voices A Hallowe’en Tale by S.K. Orr There it came again. Soft, but intentional, like a breath exhaled with measured force, or a hand across the painted wood of the clapboards at the back door. She paused at the stove, the spoon motionless in the stew like an oar in calm water, opening her mouth slightly so that she could hear better. Whissss. Her head came around with as much slow and deliberate control as she could manage. Through the window, she could see the early evening woods marching up the hill towards the eastern pasture, and some sort of bird flitting from branch to branch in the bare…
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Pictures At the End of October
I took a ramble this afternoon in a drizzling rain, and took a few photos. Here they are. ~ S.K. Orr
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All Hallow’s Eve Eve
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. ~ Edgar Allen Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher Since childhood, I have enjoyed Mr. Poe’s stories and poems, and that opening line from Usher is so evocative of a certain type of day in the fall, and today, here in these mountains, we have just such a…
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Wantin’ To Go To Texas
I incurred the displeasure of the dogs today by plunking a small straw cowboy hat on their heads and taking photos of them. But I do believe — ah, here is mystery! — that they warmed to the experience, and that they were spurred (if I may be allowed a small pun) to cast their thoughts to Tejas, and to dream of being cattle dogs, and of chousing longhorns across a bluebonnet-draped field, and to rout the javelinas in the thicket, and to never again be really cold, and to learn to tell the difference between rattlesnakes and blacksnakes. Clothes make the man, they say, and hats make the dog,…
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Never Be Understood This morning I stood at our fence, flanked by frisky dogs and listening to the crow-calls and the lowing black cattle, feeling God’s good breath in my thinning hair, and I loved every caress of the living world around me. And I thought back to a sultry East Texas afternoon when my wife and I visited a state park, trying to glean a few hours of respite from our suburban rushings. We had barely settled onto the concrete picnic table and unloaded our feast when a car pulled into the spot adjacent ours. The doors flapped open and the occupants spilled out onto the woodchips that served…