Honea Express

Archive for the ‘outdoors’ Category

The truth is that the tree in the previous post was already cut down. We didn’t do it. I don’t need to report to the FTC that we received a boat or a house or a bushel of apples in exchange for the photo. It was a stump when we found it, and I have no idea if the tree ever gave or loved at all. For all I know it did nothing but take, and it could very well have deserved to die.

Also, the boy is not sad. He is doing this thing called “acting.” You could learn a lot from him, Nic Cage.

Here’s what happened:

We were almost home from the farmers’ market. We were on our bikes. The boys were between the rainbow dyes of a shared shaved ice and the promised painting of the hard boiled eggs that waited at home. I had fresh tulips sticking out of my backpack. The sun was warm and high above us. We could pass for a photograph.

There was a woman playing her ukulele under a large willow along the edge of the path and we slowed down as we rode by. That’s when we saw the stump. It was just siting there.

“Hey,” I called to the boys. “Come over here and let me take your picture.”

Zane jumped up first.

“Look,” he shouted. “I’m a sundial.”

He made a few more poses in the warm sunshine, the sound of a ukulele floating from the tree behind us.

“Our Easter eggs are white,” he said for no apparent reason.

“Don’t be racist,” I answered. He continued to work the camera, which in this case was my iPhone. He looked like he was in pain. “Now what are you doing?”

“You said to be fartsy.”

“Artsy. Get off the stump and let your brother have a turn.”

Atticus took over. He also opened with the sundial.

“It’s like the Giving Tree,” he said.

“And you’re like Einstein. What did you think we were doing out here?”

“Should I look sad?” he asked.

“Own it,” I said.

So he did, and then we got back on our bikes and went home.

The ukulele faded quickly, but the sun stayed up for hours.

Inland was warmth and sunshine and days of summer stretching wearily. The coast, however, was 20 degrees cooler and worked in so many shades of gray.  The sky fell into the sea and the waves rolled across my cold feet before running up the stairs to take their place at the end of the line.  Clouds waited patiently.

The rocks in the ocean were the size of ships, and ships were the size of small birds flying off in the distance.  There was a cave on the beach and in it sat a family around a campfire.  Their dog ran free and happy, a green ball held tightly in its mouth.

She stopped in mid-sentence, her words lost beneath the beat of a tide rolling in.  I hadn’t been listening.  I was writing poems in my head as I am prone to do, and then promptly forgetting them as that requires much less effort than actually writing them down.  Most of them were rubbish, but one may have been damn near perfect.  I watched her watch the ground.  She was brilliant against the sepia shore.

She bent down and picked a drop of red out of the surf-trodden sand. It was a ladybug, caked in grains and left for dead.  Suddenly, the beach was alive with polka-dots in reds and yellows and the polka-dots were, in turn, covered in dots of their own.  We sat on our knees in the sand and dug ladybug after ladybug from their collective coastline grave.  Our shoes, which had long ago left our feet and become something meaningless to hold on to, became the soles of rebirth. It was on the bottom of my left flip-flop that one ladybug found breath and another was once again able to crawl.  It was somewhere opposite where my big toe would be that a ladybug shook the sand from its wings and flew away home.

It seems that they live in the trees that tremble from the side of steep ocean cliffs, and when certain winds blow the way that certain winds do, the ladybugs are pulled from whatever life they have known and dropped without warning over deep waters and hungry fish. Assuming they don’t drown, are not eaten or lost at sea, they are marooned on beaches not 50 feet from the trees on which they started.  But they are pounded with ebbs and flows, and they are forgotten amongst shells and bits of seaweed.  All in all, it’s no way to treat a lady.

And so we gathered those that we could and we carried them on flip-flops covered with newfound meaning to a piece of driftwood just below the tree line. The ladybugs wandered aimlessly and probably thought things about mortality and what to make of second chances.

Every so often one of us would say how much the boys would like this while the other would nod, skip a stone or stare out at the sea. They were on a different beach in a different state looking over the same nothingness and the endless everything. Our day was a glass half hollow, half lined with romance. We played the percentages.

Then we walked back across the beach, our shoes once again empty, our feet still cold and bare.  We passed big rocks, small ships, a family around a fire and a dog with a ball and the constant need to wag.   Our car was waiting for us, and beyond it a green forest and blue skies and something pretty on the radio.

We got sand everywhere.

It is winter. It falls. It is not yet spring.

Twilight dances from dawn to dusk. It is morning. It is evening. It is mid-afternoon.

There is sunshine on my window. There is a lamp shining softly through and out of the day. It was raining. It will rain again. It may be raining now.

There is coffee in a mug to the left of me. It is always there from the moment I rise until the moment I sleep. Sometimes it tastes like whiskey.

There is something of soul and strings on the stereo and it drives me to work and to play and to sit and do nothing but stare at clouds caressing the mountain.

These words fall like so many other melancholy ramblings that have come before them, but they are deeper than that. They are the edge of my contentment and the threat of pending comfort. They are fresh water over old grounds and a cup that never empties.

It is a safe place within these walls. There is love, peace and lingering laughter. There is warmth and a view and a fire always burning. It feels very much like a thing called home.

The Christmas lights weren’t going to hang themselves. The box of lights, staples and some plastic clips designed to adhere electrical wires to the overflowing gutters had been working as a doorstop for days. It was time they earned their keep. Besides, it wasn’t getting any warmer.

The overnight low had been in the single digits. The high wasn’t even old enough to drink. I finished my second pot of coffee and like Griswald before me I plugged into the season.

I stood on a ladder made of ice. Visions of sugarplums breaking their necks danced in my head. I was, for a moment, glad that my children were not there to see it. But I lived and I am lit and I never even touch the stuff.

Today I woke to another sunny, frozen morning. Yellow-breasted robins appeared outside my window. A number of blue jays bounced from branch to branch and perched upon the rail in front of me – their colors vibrant and brisk.

They put the lights to shame.

If I stand on my rooftop I can see a lake and hills and then another lake and hills again. Beyond that, blocked from view, is a skyline that falls into the sea and a coast that leads south to a place where my family can’t see the ocean but for the mountains between them.

It’s mostly side streets from there.

The boys play loudly on a floor with the toys that they packed themselves. There are no holiday lights or signs of the season. There are no stockings or carols or television specials, just the gift that they don’t know they are giving.

In the corner of the room there is a bed with their grandfather in it, watching them play and whispering their names and every new goodnight is their last goodbye.