- Daily Life, Holy Days, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Jinx, Photographs, Reflections, Saints
Something In The Air
We awoke to one of those days that couldn’t be more perfect for the Orr temperament if we’d sat down with a Weather & Scenery Catalogue and ticked off all the boxes for the Saturday we were ordering. A muted, witchy glow of cloud-shrouded afterthought of a sun, leaves layered like the scales of Jonah’s fish across the slippery skin of the mountain earth, the rain as fine as the mist at the produce section in the grocery store, the stillness and sacredness that churches and even libraries once had but will never have again. When I swung my legs over the bed and touched the floor, the Spotted Southern…
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Numbering The Stones
If you look carefully at the photo above, you will see a daddy longlegs in the upper left quadrant. I took this picture this past Saturday while Jinx and I were exploring in the little country cemetery near our farm. We were there explicitly to count the gravestones, something I had been meaning to do for some time. The gravestone itself is one of my favorites, the marker of a Jesse Lane, who served the Confederacy in a regiment from his home state. The stone is simple and dignified, like the ones at Arlington National Cemetery, and I usually touch it in passing. On this particular cool day, it radiated…
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Between
On my walk this morning before dawn, my shoes marking my cadence on the gravel, the deer in the distance alerted by the measured stride of a two-legged creature, I was exactly between two heavenly bodies. At the country cemetery, I looked west and saw the moon hanging high above the kingdom she ruled during last night’s dark hours. And then I turned and went to the fence and looked east, and I saw the pockets of mist in the distant hollows of this chain of mountains, mist lit by the light crawling up from behind those peaks, and then in an instant the day had begun and the regal…