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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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Fourth Sunday in Advent
I was thinking today about the year when we didn’t think we’d have a Christmas. We saw my daddy between two and four times a year. One of those visits was always between Thanksgiving and Christmas. He would show up and slam his truck door loud enough for us to hear it, and my sister and I would run outside to greet him. He would stand there, fists on hips, that devious, smiling, lean, dishonest devil of a father, laughing that completely delighted laugh of his, his weather-bronzed face split by an enigmatic smile, and scoop us up in his arms and swing us around as he loped to the…
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Paw
He was not my kin, but perhaps someday I will find that he was, after all, one of my people. My only connection to him is long gone from my life, an ill-fated romance birthed in high school. But she introduced me to Paw, and so I am somewhat indebted to her for bringing me into his eccentric and loveable orbit. Paw was what we used to call a coon-ass, born and bred down in Louisiana’s swamp country, that murky and mystical patch of America with its legends and lore, its distinctive patois and food all a part of the myths of the Cajun people. He and his wife, Granny,…
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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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Dissipated Milestone
Today marks the 246th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. It’s an anniversary that once meant so much to me, as the Corps itself once did. And now she is tattered, stained, dishonored, decrepit, and dissipated beyond repair. Exactly like the former nation she once defended. I do not celebrate today’s Marine Corps, but I do remember fondly the comrades I once had. I’ve never had friends like the ones I had in the Corps, and my life was never as focused, and I never felt as alive. So I celebrate the Corps, as I do so many other things, in the halls of my memories. Back when I…
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All Hallow’s Eve
I remember dragging shopping bags through the damp grass, bags filled with Halloween candy, praying that the bottom of the bag wouldn’t give way like it did on my cousin Debbie that one year, and how she lost all her candy in the weeds outside old lady Hutt’s house, and I didn’t care, because I never liked Debbie anyway. I remember wearing my costume to school, and how my breath condensed inside the cheap plastic mask, and how scary and powerful I felt when we prowled the streets in a mob of ten or twenty, back before the idea of vandalism or violence had ever crept into our minds. I…
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Down In The Dirt
Saturday was supposed to be a home day, a day of chores and catching up on rest and spending time with Mrs. Orr and sporting with Jinx. But a small possum made shreds of my plans and I had to spend much of the day undoing his damage, along with trips to town to obtain the needed materials for the repair job. So the hours unspooled and we found ourselves in stores and we found ourselves in a restaurant, and we found ourselves watching people and wincing at what they wore, how they spoke, how they acted. We were relieved when we found ourselves back on our road, greeted at…
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Search, Search
My wife and I took a leisurely drive through some of the small hamlets just north of our little farm. The day was sunny and mild, and the car seemed to pilot itself, looping back and forth on the curves and switchbacks, through the fields of strawberries and tobacco, past the Black Angus, cropping grass with the placid patience of monks who have nowhere to go except to Compline. Great beauty surrounded us on the drive, but so did extended swaths of rusted poverty and squalor. The weathered gray boards of barns stood guard next to the peeling-painted houses with their spare-tire planters and last year’s Christmas lights draped along…
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Thursday In Holy Week
It’s a shame that we’re going to have some snow today, along with freezing temperatures the next two nights. The blooms and blossoms around our little farm are particularly zestful right now, with the peach trees, dogwood, redbud, forsythia, pear trees, daffodils, and various bulbs all in full glory. It would have been a spectacular Easter Sunday morning, but will probably be somewhat muted. Ah, well. The good Lord knows what He’s doing. Today marks what would have been the 100th birthday of my wife’s beloved father. Pawpaw was a remarkable person, a self-made man in every sense of the term. Forced to leave school at age eight in order…