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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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Under A Pink Moon
Have you ever noticed it? The way an approaching change in weather can be detected by all creatures beneath the gaze of heaven? Birds will skim the sweet grass, seeking insects before a drenching rain, and cows will lie down in the fields, resting the joints that the coming showers foretell in them, just as the stooped farmer feels the same ground-glass ache in his knotted knuckles. The very trees seem to face the wind and cross their arms, wondering if this will be the toppling day, or if tomorrow will see them still stretching above the quilt of still things, the soil and dirt that listen, that are aware,…
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Even Within A Mere Ninety-Six
At the end of a trying day, I was driving home through the late winter mist, watching the cars near me for the too-frequent signs of someone texting while driving, thinking of the long walk I would take Jinx on after I got home and fed him supper, determined to find a way to control some of his excess energy. My phone rang. My wife was calling. “I have some sad news,” she said. “Okay….” “Helen [our nearest neighbor, from the next farm over] called me. A man came by, and he was looking for his dog. It was Jinx.” I felt my throat close like a fist. “Oh…
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Luck Of The Paw
I took off yesterday from work so that I could take care of some things on which I’ve been procrastinating. It was Friday the 13th, so it seemed an appropriate day to venture out and seek accomplishments. The main objective was to take care of some business with the Veteran’s Administration. The closest VA center is located a few towns over, and we got an early start. My wife and I found our way to the sprawling campus and were surprised at how busy it was. Friendly guides were everywhere, helping the incoming veterans to park and to find which building they needed to transact their business. We watched silver-haired…
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A Quiet And Powerful Parade
On the dark drive to work, I was thinking about how unquiet my heart can sometimes be, and I found myself longing for a more peaceful day. I can always assess my drift towards melancholy because I catch myself sighing a lot. When I arrived at work, my wife forwarded me a text from one of our daughters-in-law, a text with a video attached. The video gave me just what I was longing for. A man in Pennsylvania has a camera set up year-round on his property, stationed at one end of a log that spans a creek. The camera records all the creatures that use the log to cross…
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Memories Of My Dog
Some years ago, there was a television commercial for cheese, an ad in which people were shown doing all sorts of risky and humorous things in order to acquire a piece of golden cheddar. At the end of the commercial, a mellow male voice would intone, “Behold the power of cheese.” We saw this power in action a few times with our dog Bonnie. One wintry day several years ago, Bonnie was outside exploring. My wife heard her run up onto the back deck, and so she went to let the dog in. When she opened the door, she saw Bonnie holding the rear half of a large rabbit in…
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Blood Flowing
In cold weather, cardinals nest together in the boughs of evergreen trees, huddling as a group for warmth. Just now, as the faintest line of light ran along the eastern horizon, I heard the faint pip of a cardinal in the large pine outside. And I have to wonder, as I sometimes do, if they stretch when they wake up. Dogs do. Cats do. Do cardinals open their masked eyes , yawn with their conical beaks — that’s another question…do birds yawn? I can’t recall if I ever saw any of my chickens yawn — or open their wings wide and get in a good pinion-cracking stretch, just to get…
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The Beginning Of March
The coffee tasted especially good this morning; my wife found a new variety at a local store and it is now a favorite. I stepped outside to clip my fingernails, careful to keep the sun behind me as it slashed across the needle points and glass shards of frost on the grass. While I was about my business, I listened to the birds calling to each other across the hollers. Are the back-and-forth songs merely a “Hello! How are you this morning?” or are they a communication of important information, the inflection and tone and volume carrying nuances that only an avian heart can catch and decipher? The feeders were…
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A Big Little Life
Up until this past weekend, I had read exactly one book by Dean Koontz. It was a supernatural suspense novel called Whispers, and I read it when I was a young Marine in 1980. The book came into my possession just as I was ending a two-or-three year spree of reading Stephen King novels, and I was growing tired of the genre. Whispers did its work with me — it kept me up late into the night reading, and later kept me awake listening to the night sounds and thinking about the world Koontz had created. But I assumed that Mr. Koontz was treading the same ground King had already…
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Towards, Then Past, Then Wondering
I was lost in thought as I drove home this evening, my mind splintered by the day’s frustrations and the mountains before me, bearded as they were with February mist, my almost-formed thoughts bunching up and then firing off in some of the directions to which they’re prone, then looping back and catching hold of the lullaby voice of Father Chad Ripperger, whose podcast was playing while the tires spun the rain back behind me and the wipers kept a cadence like 45 pairs of boot heels digging into the surface of the grinder beneath that unrainy sky so many years ago. The road sweeps down through a mountain gap…