Gray Snooze Alarm

Only gray on this morning, front yard, and then grey.  Gray is like the great peek-a-boo, never much of a color on its own but likes playing hide and seek with all the others.  Gray is soft, blending all the earth in stillness allowing time to slow down, the snooze soft alarm on morning, canceling early for “in a little while.”  Gray is friendly, saying “have another cup of coffee, I have this, the earth and all its glory are still here but lets all lounge around awhile before getting started.”  Gray on is like the day beginning when you say so, a long slow stretch atop flannel sheets, settling back in, reschedule to mid-morning, your alarm not going off.  Gray, a wonderful concept for mornings and for you.  

One side of our shore stabilization.

A Peanut Butter Jar Guy In A Terabyte World

I am beginning to wonder about all this information I’m accumulating.  For 40 years I lived without any information and now I have more information than I know what to do with.  I have to keep getting bigger “space” which sounds like some new class of demon, terabyte, in order to store all my information.  Every time IT gives me a bigger demon it stores my information in pits of hell I can’t find and am almost scared to look for.  Here is the problem.  I was raised in a time when you saved things like screws, washers, and wire because you might need them later.  I have old peanut butter jars filled with all this saved stuff.  That is my level of technology comfort.  So, I am a peanut butter jar guy in a terabyte world.

        

The Vice of Love and Care or That Cauldron is a Hoax

The greatest evolutionary riddle, where does love come from?  The common assertion that it is the adaptation to ensure survival rings so clinical, like proving light with a light bulb.  Now that I have grandchildren the matter is a paramount part of my life, a new love that physically places by heart in a vise of exquisite pain.  Only one thing ever prepped me for the experience; my mom and mamaw use to each began to weep when they would talk about certain of their grand and great-grandsons.  At the time I thought it peculiar like their emotions were unwarranted, strange because the individuals were generationally removed from them.  Now I know it myself and the old axiom, blood is thicker than water really means it grows thicker over the years until it is often the steel in the vice of love and care, the tie that binds—love; as if we conjured it up ourselves.  Even in 4.5 billion years, that cauldron is a hoax.  God is good.  All the time.  God is good.

Homesteaders In 2020

Fair Haven has awakened a sincerity in me that I never knew nor dreamed existed, the love and longing I have for 79 Countrywood Dr., Jackson, TN.  Fair Haven is yet untamed, the halter on but not much more.  The Tennessee rises out of its banks twice a year, the soil is shallow and not yet able to provide for much more than was already here and what does survive the deer eat.  Our small studio stands like a blunt glass-faced stone to the many storms that roll in from the west and the sun is intensified off the river.  We are off the grid and our driveway dead-ends at the end of the forest and the beginning of the river.  We put in all the utilities and amenities including the road that allow us to survive and bring in supplies.  We work continually making a homestead to which someday we hope to add a home.  Her wilderness never lays down and surrenders and great wisdom is required to know what needs to be tamed and what just needs to be kept at bay.  Countrywood Drive, however, is an oasis in the woods, 27 mature trees surrounding a solid brick home old enough to be completed married to her setting and connected to all the conveniences of modernity.  It’s a comfortable home needing only the love of an occasional remodel to continue to serve as our home.  The most meaningful is the ease by which we care for one another, she long since tamed to the wagon, we aging to mostly need the lift.  Fair Haven is a mustang, never bridled, and will need both of us to break her.   The key, like parenting, is to break her will but not her spirit, and hope to have the backs still strong enough to pull it off.  

              

Faded Memories

One of the greatest gifts of youth is its memory.  By the time you age enough to want to remember it you have mostly forgotten all but the good times.  The many indiscretions have long since faded—all memories seem to be blessed with the forgiveness of forgetfulness.  I only remember an idyllic youth, filled with friends, sports, and adventures.  I am no fool though, my youth was also filled with want, with deep wounds inflicted by the church and clearer still the many ways in which I was sorrowful toward others.  This walk down memory lane just got crossways with briars and gnarled rhododendron.  The trails of the prodigal always lead through the sty but in my case, my earthly father awaited on the porch beside my heavenly Father.  One of the greatest memories of my youth is that I always felt my parents to be proud of me or at least proud of who they knew I could be.  I guess my great memories are more due to my great parents than my great living.  Like I said, one of the greatest gifts of youth is its memory.  

       

Good Morning, Good Night, The Weekend Days

I love when the river has yet been discovered by the lotioned masses, all atop water toys that carve the river into a heaving jumble of moving humps all marching to a different drummer. The mornings are so still, the deer wade along the far shore while every bird awakes in flight.  Around noon the quiet will be put away, players will begin to play, lovers romp and teenagers’ race by immortal at mortal making speeds.  It will be the rush hours and will carry on till late afternoon.  Then just as soon as they came, all the speed and spirographs will die away.  They will haul off their machines, tuck them in garages, the TVs, iPhones, iMacs, video games and Netflix will be tuned in and life will return to normal.  Then once again the river and I will begin to stretch ourselves out, the sun will seep into the waning hour, the stars will awaken in the east and all the glory of every day will bow worshipfully before our Maker in a whisper, “good night.”

PS: One of the great rewards of Fair Haven is that the above only happens maybe 20 or 30 days of any year.  There is a mass flurry that opens the summer but fades quickly.  Mostly it is just quiet here.  

Presenting Ralph Lauren’s Assisted Living Collection

I have old person issues.  My doctor put me on baby aspirin about 3 years ago and now I bruise like my Mamaw did when was 90.  It's embarrassing.  I continually wear purple polka dots like they’re the latest thing off the rack on 5^th Avenue.  The other day I changed the belt on my riding lawn mower and two days later I could have walked the runway at Ralph Lauren’s opening summer collection.   

My designer.