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Winter Completed
You think winter will never end, and then, when you don’t expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes, and a different light. — Wendell Berry Last night before bed, I let the dogs out into the back yard. I tracked them with the flashlight, wary of what might scamper away from them in the dark, setting up a chase and an opportunity for noise. In the beam of the flashlight, I saw what looked like little snowflakes. I stuck out my arm and tiny white crystalline dots clung to the fabric of my sleeve. Huh, I thought. Two days ago, it was almost seventy degrees. That can’t…
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Last Saturday in the Fall
The good news is that Joy Cartwright is feeling much better, and I am grateful. The bad news is that I am feeling pretty crappy. Started feeling very droopy yesterday after, with all those flulike symptoms of dizziness, achy bones, flushed face, sneezing, completed congested head, etc. It’s been a real fun time and I’m trying not to re-gift it to Mrs. Orr. *** Speaking of Mrs. Orr, she took the oldest granddaughters out yesterday for their birthday. They wanted Chinese, and so after they ate, they asked their MeeMaw to take them to a used bookstore they particularly enjoy. Yes, they are definitely our granddaughters with their hunger for…
- 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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Warm Fades
Today was one of those October days that seemed ordered from a catalog, ticking off the options: electric blue sky…flaming riot of leaves falling and swirling in the wind….mild, warm breeze…long stretches of silence split only by birdsong. We ate brunch at a new place one town over, recently opened by a retired firefighter and his family. Just after they opened, one of their sons died tragically, and they had to close up for a while. Since they have reopened, we decided to give them a try today. It’s a little cafe’, clean and nicely decorated in a firehouse motif. Nothing fancy. We heard our waitress talking to a patron…
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Working Conversations About Grams
If this ain’t October weather, it’ll do ’til October gits here, as Tommy Lee Jones might say. Crispy, gusty, leaf-splayed, paintbrush-daubed, frost-threatening, owl-hooting, cloud-scuttling October. We went down to a nearby town yesterday and ate at a seafood restaurant we’d both heard good things about for years. The reports were more than accurate. We had a great waitress who, when not serving customers, was in constant motion cleaning and sprucing up the place. The restaurant was immaculate as a result. We each got a lunch special, very reasonably priced, and we figured the meals would be the usual slightly-reduced-in-size lunch entrees. Nossir. Mrs. Orr got popcorn shrimp, and I got…
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October Settles In
A week ago today, Mrs. Orr and I spent the afternoon on the back porch with a fan on, swatting yellowjackets and watering the flowers. Today? The promised cold front swept in night before last, and we are snuggled in the living room, wearing sweaters. We finally fired up the furnace this morning and it was pleasant to feel the chill melt out of the rooms. Putting the flannel sheets on the bed will be the final sob in our season of grieving the loss of warm weather. But…this is life, and we are grateful for it. Can one describe an October day without using the word “crisp?” The day…
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Quiet Entry
Purple-Hull pea blossom The first Sunday of fall, and it has strolled in quietly. The sky is completely overcast, but no approach of rain. It was chilly enough on the front porch this morning for me to have to don a light jacket. Mrs. Orr and I sat out there, her shelling peas, me watching the birds. A downy woodpecker was on the downed pine, his steady staccato attack ringing across the valley. A pair of titmice took turns bathing in the birdbath while a goldfinch perched at the edge, sipping and watching. A murmuration of starlings in the next pasture swung and swooped and startled my wife with…
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Days Upon Days
The temperatures are so very mild here now…about 72F , sunny and mild, with rock-bottom humidity. The sensitive antennae of my bones tell me that winter will approach with more speed than I had anticipated. Mrs. Orr and I were talking recently about how we used to dread the hot weather — because in Texas, that’s really all we had — and how we welcomed the fall and winter months. Not no more, ese! The cold has an effect that it didn’t in our salad days, so there is a novel sense of dread now with the shifting sun patterns and the almost-chilly breeze. I am watching the hummingbirds closely,…
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Labor Day
The humidity was heavy in the air this morning, much more pronounced than yesterday. It will be an oppressively hot day, but looking at the calendar, I am mindful that this will change more quickly than I like to believe. The sun is beginning to get that Emily Dickinson “certain slant” to it, and the days and evenings feel slightly different, as though there has been some subtle but great turning — which there has. This earth is moving and tilting in preparation for the months that will bring winter to this hemisphere. When I look at the skies, whether in the blue of day or the pinpricked black of…
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The Only Day
Today marks the ninth anniversary of the day my mother departed this life and went on to the next one. My sister and I chatted about this last night, remembering some of the happy times and some of the not-so-happy times we shared with the stoic, flinty old woman who gave us life and fed us and sheltered us and tried to guide us. I miss you, Mother, and I love you. I hope to see you again when my own time comes to sail into the west. *** It’s still hot here and will reach 90 today and for the remainder of the week, but the mornings have been…