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Draws Near
From now on, to the end of this blog, I’m going to try to just put it all down as it comes to me, for good or for ill. All I can do is place my memories and my thoughts on the palette, and daub from there. *** I went to the landfill today to dump our accumulated week’s worth of trash. It was pleasant to cross over the mountain, down through the pass and into the valley where Daniel Boone labored and fought, all without a 401(k) or a Facebook page. The mountains still have a tinge of green on them, owing to the presence of good conifers, and…
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Kingdom Of Remnants
I am looking through the glass doors, looking outside at the peach trees Mrs. Orr and I tucked into the earth several years ago, now standing bare-limbed in the cold air at the edge of the front meadow. The trees have never done very well in terms of producing edible fruit, but they are lovely when they blossom and their leaves provide a nice shade beneath which we sometimes sit in the Adirondack chairs in warm weather. Someday those trees will be dead and gone, and perhaps no one in future years will ever know that beautiful peach trees once stood in that spot, on that gentle rise in the…
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Into The Void Before Sundown
The first time I met Len, he had just arrived at our elementary school, a transplant from California, which made him interesting and exotic to someone from Pig’s Knuckle Junction like myself. He was taller than me, Nordic blonde, and bore a resemblance to Glen Campbell. Len had a great line of patter and that flat, explosively-bitten-off accent that Californians flaunt. We became fast buddies and palled around together from the get-go. We both loved tetherball, which was the rage in the elementary schoolyards during that age. We would race to the poles when the recess bell rang and play furiously until time to return to class. Len had been…
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All Hallow’s Eve
Jinx and I went for our morning stroll while it was still full dark, the coin of the full moon shining down on the grass, the blades silvered by the breath of some Frost Giant who slumbered among these mountains during the night. I watched my dog sprint and prance among the tombstones in the graveyard, his shadow flitting along with him while the large owl in the adjacent trees asked his eternal question and the coyotes on the ridge sang their eerie songs across the lit valley and a rooster crowed in a nearby farmyard. Halloween already, and tonight we turn the clocks back to what my grandmother used…
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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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Glimpse Impression
The car moved towards me in the parking lot this morning when I arrived. It was still dark, and the lights on their tall poles threw their long cone-beams down onto the damp asphalt. I heard it before I saw it, a rough, laboring engine in an older vehicle. I stopped to let it pass before crossing the lot. The light fell on the car and showed me the driver. Single mom, I thought. She was young, with still-wet hair plastered down on her head, her face full of the kind of worried concentration that comes from paying bills with credit cards, accepting donations from food pantries and smug relatives,…
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The Magical Leaf
It’s one of those things in this region that holds on. You not only see people using it in its various forms, but also growing it, even in small, hillside or backyard patches. The farms near my home in any direction, dug into the rocky mountain soil, coax vegetable and grain crops each year, but a surprising number of them grow the devil’s lettuce. A country drive at this time of year will take one past leafy fields so pretty and so poetic, they make even a tee-tobacco-er want to stop and get out and gather an armful. This dedication to tobacco is not only understandable to me, but also…
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Red Pebbled Plastic Glass
When I was eight years old, my Aunt Carolyn dropped by for a visit. Aunt Carolyn was not like her older sister, my mother. She was unmarried, an Air Force veteran, working a cushy job for the government. She was a nation-trotter, a quick-laugher. She was the first person I ever knew who possessed and used credit cards. Her life was a bullet, shot far from us. Her red Chrysler pulled up out front on a cool Friday night and she left the car running while she trotted to our front door and shoved it open. I was listening to an Exotic Guitars lp on Mother’s radio/record player and looked…
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Hourglass
Summer is on us in full force. Driving to work this morning, the haze in the air gave a taste of drowsiness, of lassitude. The mountains to the south of us are famously known as the Great Smoky Mountains, but the Clinch Mountains in which I live and move and have my daily being are smoky enough under their own rippling power. I passed a group of cows with their calves and noticed one little heifer with a white face, placid beneath a locust tree. She looked as if she’d forgotten to remove her cold cream when she tumbled out of bed at first light. I believe our eyes met…
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June Into July
There he is again, above me, half-watching me as I am half-watching him. As I write this, the hummingbird is on the telephone wire over my head, his tiny feet curled around the wire, his baton of a bill moving left and right, conducting the orchestra only he and his kin can hear. The summer day is hot and still, and much quieter than the summer Sundays of my youth, the sultry days down in the Delta when the reedy drone of locusts and katydids stretched across the hours and surprised you at night when it began to fade. Quieter here, yes, and perhaps not as hot, but hot still.…