Thanksgiving

"Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget none of His benefits..."

Psalm 103:2

The Prayer by Vincent Van Gogh

Il Divo

  
     I sat alone in the car in the grocery store parking lot waiting for my husband to return with a roasting chicken and loaf of french bread for our lunch, when I suddenly heard singing. I looked around to see where it was coming from. The music wasn't that primal base so many enthusiasts seem to enjoy sharing with the rest of us, beating its way through walls and rattling windows till it pulses inside your bones, and the singer wasn't the usual rap or rock star. The driver's-side window in the car next to me was lowered a few inches and a middle-aged, ethnic-looking gentleman was listening to opera. Something Spanish or Italian, I think. It isn't often you hear opera played loudly in the grocery parking lot, so I rolled down my own window to listen. Then I smiled. The man was singing along. He was no Pavarotti, Carreras, or Domingo, but he was enjoying himself.

     It was a dust of snow moment.

A Drop in the Bucket

     We were not in the habit of leaving our doors unlocked at night. We didn't live in that kind of neighborhood. But then someone let the cat out and forgot...

     When I was in high school I shared an upstairs bedroom with my older sister. Late one night after everyone had gone to bed, I awoke suddenly, sensing something was wrong. I heard shouting downstairs and scrambled out of bed three steps behind my sister. We tried to open the door at the bottom of the stairs, but someone on the other side slammed it shut against us. I smelled smoke. I was scared. One of my worst fears had materialized; our house was on fire! I didn't know what to do, so I did the first thing that came into my head: I ran back upstairs to the bathroom, emptied the trashcan onto the floor and began filling it with water.

     Everything else is a blur, but when the smoke had cleared—literally—I was standing in the diningroom in my pajamas hugging an empty trashcan as firemen sucked smoke from our house with their equipment. Somehow, the armchair in the corner of the livingroom nearest the front door had caught fire. Somehow, my dad had managed to drag the burning chair outside onto the lawn before the rest of the house caught fire. The carpet was ruined and there was smoke damage but that was all; except for a little singeing, not even my dad was hurt. There had been seven of us asleep in the house that night; it could have been so much worse.

     It wasn't the first fire in the neighborhood that year. Several garages had already burned to the ground and arson was suspected. Even so, I was called out of class one day at school for an interview with the fire marshal. He asked if one of my siblings or I might have been sneaking a cigarette and left it burning near the chair. Most of us had tried smoking at one time or another, but none of us was stupid enough to light up anywhere near home.

     A few weeks later the house across the street caught fire during the night. Investigators determined that the livingroom sofa was the source of the blaze, but the neighbors were smokers so it remained uncertain whether or not arson was involved. Then one morning as my dad was leaving for work, he found signs of a fire just inside our garage door. The door was closed and the fire had died out before it had done any real damage. It appeared to us that another arsonist plot had been providentially foiled.

     I am glad to say that the man responsible was eventually caught in the act of setting fire to a shed in broad daylight and was arrested.

     I think back to that small trashcan full of water, that drop in the bucket I had grabbed in order to help put out a fire; if our house had been ablaze it would have been useless no matter how good my intentions were. We are a family of gospel faith so, naturally, we give God the credit for our preservation. We are all grateful that He spared us. It is the kind of experience that has given me pause over the intervening years to consider the weight of my life. In the end, will I have spent it on things that matter? So it is that I pursue a grace-filled purpose in the hope that my drop in the bucket may one day become a flood.

Spooky

     The Tower of Flints...patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadows.

                                                      ~ Titus Groan by Mervyn Peak ~ 

Autumn's Comma

    

     Fall often comes as a comma in this neck of the woods; some years you hardly draw breath before it moves on. I feel almost resentful when summer burns late into October, or an early freeze strips the last of the leaves from the trees and shudders snow onto naked pumpkins lying hopeful in the fields. At the same time, it is the very brevity of the season that makes my pleasure in it so exquisite. I feel its colors. I think in its superlatives.

     Summer’s heavy warmth withdraws, and nighttime frost-falls kindle the fires of burning bush to a crackling scarlet. Flamboyant maples and sumac flout the monochromatic schemes of evergreens and shout their calliope colors into the wind. A few ragged, yellow coins still flutter from the branch tips of the birch at the front of the house, a cushion of gold collects on my garden bench, a carpet of gold covers the lawn, and I feel as rich as a king in the Midas-touch of autumn.

     I walk out for a jacket and scarf stroll at sunset, the light-fingered winds twitching at anything that isn’t tied down or buttoned up. A pale half-moon creeps across the sky with one, wide eye peeking out at me from behind earth’s shadow. Down the street a young boy throws handfuls of leaves over his head, again and again, watching them drift to the ground like ash. There is joy in his face. Long ago, I used to do the same, so did my girls; it’s a legacy of childhood like making snow angels in winter and sucking nectar from clover in summer. Just as I round the bend on the last stretch toward home, the embered sun dips below the world’s rim, a glow the color of autumn still smoldering in the sky. I hear a flock of geese crossing low on the horizon, trumpeting their lament to the dying light.

     These are hot chocolate days punctuated by nutmeg and cinnamon moments. In the chill, early morning, I stand in a stream of amber sunlight slanting through the kitchen window and feel it pour over me like maple syrup. Soon, warmth will become a crop to harvest, something to bake into stews, pies and bread, or tend in the grate, or pull up to my chin at night.

     I soak it all in—the color, spice and warmth—garner its gifts, wrap it close like a cloak, drink up its dregs to the very last drop—and then step into winter… 

photo credit Keith Levit

Up Too Early

     I was up at 3 am to see my daughter off to work and my husband off for another trip to the orient. Ours seemed to be the only lights showing through wakeful windows. Too early for industry, I sat in the kitchen sipping tea, eating buttered toast and reading poetry. Mostly Emily Dickinson. You’ll like this one, I think:

Ribbons of the Year—

Multitude Brocade—

Worn to Nature’s Party once

Then, as flung aside

As a faded Bead

Or a Wrinkled Pearl

Who shall charge the Vanity

Of the Maker’s Girl?

The house was so quiet I could hear dawn break. Then I went back to bed and slept like a slattern until 9 am.

When I awoke there were rag-ends of poetry fluttering around in my head, so I pieced some of them together to make a little patchworked poem for you:

Autumn Leaves by Mark Karrass

Wet winds flap their weighted wings,  

And flocks of colored quills             

Leap into the sky                              

Fly!

A bright-pinioned swirl,                     

Brief twirl, and leaves fall like         

Feathers across the crowded lawn.

Hydroponic Biscuits

     My husband and I were visiting family in Southern California last week. We drove out to the Santa Rosa Valley one morning to see Uncle Pete who lives on a small ranch at the brow of a hill overlooking a park of eucalyptus trees and avocado groves. It had been brutal all week in the valleys with temperatures over 100º but the ocean breathed gently across the hilltops and lifted the burden of heat for the day.

     My husband’s uncle raises quarter horses in Oklahoma and keeps several palominos and bays on his California property. Most ranchers are dependant on hay for fodder to feed their livestock, but hay has recently gone from $150 to $300 per ton because of widespread drought conditions in the United States. It makes it difficult for even the backyard horseman to keep many animals.

     Uncle Pete hasn’t got pasture on his ranch so he bought an Australian-made hydroponics unit from a farmer in Bakersfield who couldn’t figure out how to keep the sprouts he was growing from molding. We drove golf carts down the hill from the house to the horse corrals and stood beneath the cool, breezy shade of eucalyptus trees, listening to the 81 year-old great-grandfather describe with a lingering trace of Oklahoma drawl his trials and errors as he tinkered with the unit over the past six months. Then he demonstrated how he grows the luscious green barley mats he calls "biscuits" that account for two-thirds of his horses’ diet. He couldn’t produce enough feed to sustain them with the single unit, so he built another one himself for a fraction of the cost. The new unit isn’t climatized and hasn’t been tested through the winter, but I am still impressed.

  
     The whole process is rather too labor-intensive for a man of Pete’s age, so his next challenge, he says, is to make it easier. He’s not an armchair man, and he’s still got the curiosity, ingenuity and drive of a self-made man, so I think he’ll do it. Maybe someday in the future school children will be reading about Eli Whitney's cotton gin and Hydroponic Pete on their iPad textbooks.