Wings and a Prayer

This great river has been put back to right. The human celebration of every summer holiday stirs it up into a heaving boil but it always mends itself back to natural. It’s right now, quiet, smooth and even the littles among the world, like the sweat bee on my computer with its iridescent wing, can enjoy its garden again.  A wedded bluebird is feeding his bride, the herons glide by, the deer feed in the shallows, and somewhere across toward the islands a goose is trumpeting. It is quiet as the earth can be filled with harmony and sweet peace.  Lying beside me is The Ancient Text, a soothing primer to it all, the Garden Almanac by God.  There’s a woodpecker’s rhythm, a fish breaks free of his water bonds and overhead a tiny plane; “a safe journey” I pray.  In the garden we have time for gratefulness of all kinds, even wings, those of the sweat bee and the Piper Cub. 

Paying My Debt To Remember

It’s breaking like a beautiful Memorial Day even as we somberly consider those whose days ended giving for us their last great measure.  I have my flag up, Old Glory went up at the break of dawn.  I would consider myself a patriot, I certainly love American and Tennessee and have tried to raise my children appropriately.   Betty’s parent’s family served honorable in WW II, her father shipped out from San Francisco to fight in the Pacific Theater across all the islands ending in Hiroshima Japan.  Her mom’s brothers all fought in the European Theater, her Uncle Joe Zitnick, a fighter pilot, was shot down and killed over Belgium.  My sister’s husband, Jan Jaggers, was an artilleryman in Vietnam, and my beloved neighbor, Mr. Lanny Edwards was a door gunner in a Huey in that same war.  God has granted this old red neck enough grace that even now I strain to keep the tears behind my eyes as I consider how many have given so much for me and mine.  I raise my heart to all of you!  I and my family will never forget you for what you did for all of us.  May your Memorial Days always be a remembering of us of you.  Thank You!!!    

Betty's Father

My Meaning Was A Gift to Me.

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!”  That is my story, the only one I have.  I have never gotten over it nor moved far from it as the central theme of my life.  It is all true, always, every moment of every day, Amazing Grace, wretched me.  His lovingkindness is paramount in my understanding of him and me, I bring nothing, He provides it all.  This was true when I was six, it was true on November 10, 1986 and it is true this Sunday.  It is my greatest longing that everyone will come to know His Amazing Grace and themselves as the recipient of it.  Your value to Him is demonstrated in what He gave to save you, His son, crucified.  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like _______________.  If you ever want to talk you can message me. 

I never knew the meaning of being Lee Benson until He gave it to me.   

  

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.