Snapshot: Two Falls

Eighty degrees in March is not a thing I'm accustomed to, nor the rattling of these leaves across pavement, a rattling that is like a second fall. Charleston's trees, like huskies it seems, shed twice a year or in shifts. And so, my mind and memory are lost this morning. The patio door stands open and the sounds themselves are conflated, conflicted, and confused. The birdsong wakens the sleeping neuron repositories of all the southern springs I've lived and all those I've missed in other lands and climes, but those leaves . . . those leaves, whatever they really are, my mind knows as the sound of water oaks' sheddings driven like horizontal cataracts down Stephens St as I sit in my Spitfire in my driveway in Goldsboro with the top down and sip dry sack sherry in the manner of that Falstaff whose discretion was no form of valor at all and listen to JT's Dad Loves His Work and have no inkling yet of the choices good and bad that will take my life from that more timely autumn to this second fall that is like, in so many ways, a second spring too, not outside that patio screen so much as within. And within, all time present in every moment, old ties renewed touch better selves only dormant. A squadron of phoenixes. And always, gratitude for and comfort in the harbor that exists, away from this harbor town, but within always. Days, and there again and whole.

Snapshot: Home

Two people sit in a room that could not possibly be more warmly lit. The walls are a deep red tending toward iron oxide in the light of lamps on the mantle, on the black, baby grand Steinway, and on the marble-topped end table. Plentiful windows trimmed in glossy white enamel let in the subdued light of a gray day. Rain washes the world outside and taps a syncopated rhythm in the downspout on the near corner of the two-story house. Through the paned glass rear door, deck boards glisten and reflect the gray sky broken by the branches of a winter forest. Below the deck and across a back yard of mostly moss and through the bare winter trunks beyond, the creek isn't so much angry with the surplus it hurries along as merely enthusiastic, energetic, awake and purposeful now, unlike its usual sleepy self.

Inside again, a wood fire crackles warmly in a stone fireplace and the man looks up from the corner of the couch where he's grading student essays on a notebook computer the desktop of which shows two rocking chairs and hanging baskets on the front porch of this house and the background color of which matches the walls so that when he leaves he takes this place with him (but never so much as of himself he leaves behind). He looks up at the fire, across the gray-white-and-black Husky sleeping contentedly in the middle of the thick carpet, almost but not quite snoring, centered on the fireplace and positioned halfway between the man and woman. The woman sits nearer the fire, sideways to it in a rocking chair she refinished years ago and in which she has cradled to sleep countless times her young daughter and younger son. And for all that the idea of a rocking chair calls forth visions of age, this is a young and beautiful mother whose oldest child came into this world years after the dog stretched lazily at her feet. Yet in her rocking image, as she sits editing a book on yet another notebook computer perched on the fuzzy soft blanket that warms her knees, the man sees in her the mother she is, the mother who gave her life, the grandmothers he never knew, and years hence, the grandmother she will become. And in that vision is the wellspring of the contentment we only think comes from the smell of chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven or the dulcet tones of a lullaby trickling down the stairs from the nursery like the gentle fall of water over the stones of a brook. Feeling his gaze, she looks up at him, tilts her head and smiles.

Nothing is spoken. Two separate lifetimes lead to this moment, and for now, this is but a passing like two participants at a Maypole who meet one another twice in each full round of the pole. For now, the dance is necessary. Patient they are. Because of all they've seen and what they know, they content themselves with those passing smiles. What they've each seen is what enables them to understand one another as no one else could. What they know is that the nature of the Maypole is such that each passing, each circuit of the pole, each cycle of reunion and separation brings them closer to the base, closer to a union from which parting will no longer be necessary.

For now, the rain keeps a broken rhythm, the fire crackles in counterpoint, the Husky chases Arctic hares that lope misplaced through the powdery new snow of Siberian dreams, and the man and the woman know what they know.

For now, that's enough.

Snapshot: Puppy Prozac

My dog is depressed. Too much moving from place to place. Georgia for most of the holidays, some with me, some without while I was in Colorado. Children there. Rabbit. Life in all its wonder. Gone somewhere every other weekend and more. Mid-week trip to NC for dinner with a daughter. I suspect she (the dog) is uncertain whether I live in this apartment or my Jeep or a variety of houses she calls home on any given weekend. Just as dogs have a way of cheering us when the world is at its worst, so there is nothing much more mood killing than a clinically depressed canine.

But Wednesday she met me at the door with wagging tail. And so we went for a short walk and a longer sit and contemplation.

Snapshot: Grey, low clouds scudding across the sky, driven up creek by a stiff, 19 mph breeze that makes brisk the unseasonable 66-degree, late January day. Low tide and sheets of algae lie exposed in the muddy bottom of the marsh, flapping like so many St Patrick's Day parade flags. Still in coat and tie from teaching, I turn a chair to face the wind and rest a glass of Gentleman Jack on the pier rail. The wind, not enough to force a squint, yet enough to fan a tie and jostle hair growing long enough finally to feel such a thing, drives down the marsh grass and rattles the leaves and empty branches of a winter creek bank. Repeatedly, a Husky buries her face in my lap and pushes in, her version of hug, and I rake long, firm, strokes of fingertips down the length of her back and up again, massaging a mass of too husky a Husky through fur thick for winter. She doesn't play fetch. She doesn't play tug of war. She's been canine long enough now to have forgotten her past life as a supermodel, but having early disdained the distractions that other dogs delight in and having started life too little loved before her initial rescue from a chain that had worn a raw ring round her neck, she doesn't know how to play. But she knows how to love, and knows that she prefers company to solitude, and knows her life holds too much of the latter and too little of the former of late. And so she nuzzles in with more Husky hugs while the wind bristles gray fur and clouds alike and algae flags flail.

What she really needs is some Puppy Uppers; life is Doggie Downer enough for her.

Saturday Night Live - Puppy Uppers


"Puppy Uppers pep up your pooch." "Doggie Downers: Mellows out your mutt."

Two phrases stuck in my mind for 30 years now--apt testimony to the staying power of alliteration.

Snapshot: Marsh in Fog, Evening

Shem Creek. Short fishing pier, unfrequented. 6 p.m. The dark comes early now. Quiet but for the soft whrrr of heat pumps, the faraway sound of traffic, but all that muffled tonight by a light, warm fog. Someone's streetlamp visible half a mile away over pier or boathouse, but beyond that, the condos and hotel normally visible are shrouded. A tall crystal glass of some Aussie Cab/Merlot silhouetted against the grey. A conversation of canines across the creek. Mine rests silent at my feet. She likes the pier, I think--accustomed now to coming here, sometimes only to look out across the water and marsh grass and retreat, and sometimes, like tonight, to pause for a while. To listen to the occasional splash of something alive in the marsh. To allow the breeze, heavy with the weight of the fog to caress us. The crickets to stroke our ears.

I'm learning this place. Tides. So high this morning that I could almost reach down and touch the surface. So, to the chart: +6.9 feet, it says. Then +7.0 tomorrow, before a steady regression to more normal depths. Pull of the full moon.

Fog horn this morning on waking and again now. Took a while to believe it was what it sounded like. No idea where. Something else to learn. Less than three miles to the harbor from here.

Cigar tonight perhaps. Later. After dinner, some Addison, some Steele, a little Swift, and the ever pressing paperwork. Mentally recapping the day leading up to this quiet. Solitary office hours this morning. The afternoon at the Air Force base. Retiree ID card, finally. Register for TriCare Prime. Learn what it is to pay for my health care--a pittance really, compared to anyone else, but after so long at no cost, one more reality check. Ready to be done with that life, but not ready for this.

Walking back in, a conversation of fog horns in differing pitch, like a hearing test for the wide wet world. I press the button.

Snapshot: "I'm Not Dead"

A day at home, dedicated to the paperwork that ends a marriage. Funeral rites.

Coffee on the pier. Gray day. Sluggish backward flow of an incoming tide near high. Quiet trickle of leftover stormwater from a pipe hidden by pier planks. Brown pelican passing at medium height, winging lumberous down the upstream toward open water. Sound of slow wings. The egret beneath ingresses between marsh walls, stark white against muddy banks and brown reeds.

All the while a wake of buzzards holds congress, lining the siderails of the pier reaching from across the way, stacked on roofline and chimney next door, and nearest and thickest perched by the dozen in a dead tree stretched over dead water. All this under overcast sky. Darkly hopeful watch they keep. Fit weather and fit fowl for this day's labors.

And when one circles close to see what sits so long without movement, taking it all in, a flashback. Dark bird to bring such a light thought and true. Not dead. Not yet. Not hardly.


And clearly, I need to replace that lost camera.