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Almost A Lot of Things
The other morning I bent to get a watering can so I could give some of my wife’s porch flowers a drink. When I looked down at the can, I saw movement inside. A butterfly was marooned inside, flapping its wings with less-than-vigorous motion. I reached in and scooped the little fellow up, then held him before my face. I have no way to prove this, but I could tell that the butterfly was exhausted. I held him on my hand for a minute, then called to Mrs. Orr and asked her to hold him on her palm so I could have some perspective for a photo. She whispered to…
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Memoir 4
It’s no wonder I turned out like I did, given the arid terrarium into which I was hatched. My sister, older than me by almost two years, resented me from the beginning and never hesitated to show and tell her dislike for her younger brother. In our teen years and into our twenties, she used to tell me that she hated me, that she used to wish I would die when she would watch me in my playpen or running through the yard. I was never shocked by her admissions or her venom; they made perfect sense because I saw and felt them every day. And though we have largely…
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The Ides of Memoir
As I grow older, I live more and more in the past. And so I have decided to try and return to setting down my memoir, though in a different fashion than in the past. Previously, I started and stopped a memoir focusing mainly on my mother and my relationship with her (see here, here, here, and here). For reasons I won’t delve into here, I have decided that this focus was not conducive to regular effort, and so I have decided to start again. I feel the need to record my memories of certain things, places, people, and events that have remained clanging around in my mind, and I…
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Like The Corners of My Mind
I planted the phlox last night, evenly spaced along the rock wall in the front garden. I think they will do well. I also planted a pot of English lavender, bought because I liked the soft frondy leaves and the thick, forest scent, and another purplish flower whose name I cannot recall. Right now, a curtain of rain is drawn across the farm, and everything, including the potatoes, is getting a good watering. The miniature azalea is in full bloom. It has a few dead spots inside, and will require some brave and judicious pruning. I want to take photos before I get at it with the shears. And now…
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Hard Old Life, part iv
Mother, I was watching my dog this morning and thought of you. Jinx is his name, and I’ll risk saying something foolish and declare that I think you’d like him if you knew him. He’s goofy and affectionate and spastic, with eyebrows that Laurence Olivier would envy in their expressiveness. He’s the clumsiest dog I’ve ever seen, and the most graceful when he leaps and runs, seeming to be more deer than dog. He spends long periods sitting in front of me, staring into my eyes, and if I put a blanket across him when he’s on the floor, he falls asleep in about eight seconds, which is why I…
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Hard Old Life, Part iii
Dear Mother, Gone are the days, and can this really be? Six years to this very day since I got the call and learned that you had slipped out of this life and into the next. My strongest memory of that day is not of a sense of grief, but rather the self-centered thought, “Now what do I do? I’m an orphan now.” And also, “I can’t talk to her anymore. Where did she go?” And that’s the question, isn’t it, Mother? Where did you go? I have no way of proving it to the satisfaction of the refrigerated bean-counters of today’s Christianity, but I know that sometimes you are…
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Hard Old Life, Part ii
One hundred years ago today, my mother entered this life in a tiny hamlet called Adona, a thousand miles from where I now sit. She was the first child born to my grandparents Floyd and Willie Mae, and she never lived more than one hundred miles from the sharecropper’s shack in which she drew her first breath and opened her eyes. To my knowledge, she had exactly one birthday party in her life, an awkward affair hosted by my wife and me at her house in 2001, also attended by her daughter, her son-in-law, and all of her grandchildren. But that is another story for another time. ~ SKO Dear…
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Undertakings
Jinx and I were up before the sun lifted above the fog, and the air was as cool as an August morning’s can be, full of mist and memories and murmurs, and we set out for our stroll. On the way back, the sun pierced the fog and clattered down upon us in arrows and spears, and the birds sensed the change and their cries grew more boisterous and they began to swoop from tree to fence to building to post to rock. The gravel crunched beneath my shoes and a chipmunk scampered across my path, his tail held straight up. Jinx was looking in the other direction and I…
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Recoverable And Precious
I have been working for some time now on a memoir, a memoir focused on a particular area of my life and a particular person. As the stack of pages grows incrementally, I find myself remembering things long forgotten, and discarding memories that I once thought important but now see as distractions. As with all the things I have ever undertaken in my life, I feel inadequate to the task, but I also feel a strong compelling hand in the small of my back, pushing me forward as certainly as my own fingers push the pencil along the page of my notebooks. Reading this evening in one of Frederick Buechner’s…
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Dancing With God
We have but to live, take each day as it comes, see the Lord in all that happens and have a kind of response to the will of God that is much like dancing. You must work with it. It is not a matter of passive submission. This is no way to dance; it is too heavy, too leaden, too dragging and uninspired. No, you must dance with your partner, you must cooperate, you must work with the will of God. This is the sort of dancing that leads to the kingdom and makes one free. — Brother Paul Quenon, OCSO, in his book “In Praise of the Useless Life:…