- Bluebelle, Church Life, Daily Life, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Jinx, Mrs. Orr, Photographs, Reflections
Paths of Freeze
Upon our second awakening this morning, the sun showed the crushed glass rug of frost all over everything, and my bones felt as if someone had injected crushed glass into the joints. Second awakening? Oh, yes. Our first awakening of the day was at about, ohhhhhh, 0230, when the dogs began snorting around outside our bedroom and demanding some attention. We got up to let ’em out and and see what might be yanking their emotional chains. They ran straight to the maple tree in the back yard and started leaping up on it like trained coon dogs. I shined the flashlight up into the bare branches and expected to…
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Deserts And Caves
One of the books I got last week at the library book sale was Spirituality and the Desert Experience, by Charles Cummings, OCSO (1978, Dimension Books, Denville, NJ). This exploration of spiritual deserts by a Trappist monk (he died in 2020) is very readable and possesses one of those qualities that I so enjoy in a book: the need to set the book down frequently and ruminate on what I’ve just read. In chapter two (pp. 42-44), Father Cummings describes a sleep study profiled in National Geographic magazine from March of 1975 (Vol.147, number 3) which was conducted by a French scientist named Michel Siffre. Father Cummings tells us: [Siffre]…
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Sorrows Of The Day
“Each present joy or sorrow seems the chief.” William Shakespeare I hadn’t seen them in months, and today when we met, I was so unsettled at their appearance, I had to force myself to maintain a benign smile. He is about my age, and his wife just a few years younger. They were once an outgoing and pleasant couple, ready with smiles and laughter and jests. But first he, then she, fell into the maw of modern medicine, and now farther down that road, they have both endured debilitating strokes and other ravages that have left them quiet and staring. They both stared into my face today, watching me with…
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Passages
There’s snow on the ground today. I wish you were here to see it, girl. When I walked up to your grave after I got home from work, I thought of how much you loved the white stuff, how you’d throw yourself into banks of it and run around like your tail was on fire, how you once tricked your Mama by hiding a vole in the snow and then redirecting her attention, and how you’d scoop a small pile of it onto your nose and run to me, knowing that I’d laugh like a fool. I used to accuse you of being a Viking dog, do you…