Of Place

Imagine we are sharing a book, Barbara Kingsolver's essay collection, Small Wonder.  The cover depicts a pair of scarlet macaws winging across a curtain of jungle green.  We're along toward the end of the third essay, "Knowing Our Place."  She is meditating on the shift in population balance, such that now more than half earth's people live in a city - where urban children are amazed by a back-yard gardener's pulling carrots right out of the ground.  "What other foods might grow in the ground?" he asks them.  They confer a moment, then offer their best surmise: "Spaghetti?" 

Such children "will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant's way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.  I wonder how they will imagine the infinite when they have never seen how the stars fill a dark night sky.

"We need to hold onto the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.  No endeavor could be more crucial at this moment.  The land still provides our genesis, however we might like to forget that our food comes from dank and muddy earth, that the oxygen in our lungs was recently inside a leaf, and that every newspaper or book we may pick up, including this one, is made from the hearts of trees that died for the sake of our imagined lives.

"What you hold in your hands right now, beneath these words, is consecrated air and time and sunlight and, first of all, a place.  Our story telling is as old as our need to remember the place where the water was found, where the best food grows, where we can find courage for the hunt.  Our greatest and smallest explanations for ourselves grow from place, as sure as carrots grow in dirt.

"I'm presuming to tell you something that I cannot prove rationally but instead feel as a religious faith.  I cannot believe otherwise."

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Of Time

Last night they changed the time.  We have sprung forward and begun saving daylight.

The early-blooming trees have had their say.  The redbuds down the alley briefly blazed and my neighbor’s pear tree garbed itself in white glory, all now replaced by bright leaves.  In our front yard the Arizona ash leafs out in green gold.  In back the pecans unfurl their promise.  Along the back fence the Carolina jasmine trumpets yellow, and the roses blossom coral and gold.

Along Turtle Creek Boulevard, Carolyn and I discovered yesterday, the dogwood floats out clouds of white, and in white and pink and red the azaleas have begun their slow explosion.

We were slowly, reluctantly driving to the funeral of one of her workmates, a young mother of three who was stabbed and beaten to death by her former boyfriend.  The police had arrested him for violating a peace bond, which apparently made him murderously angry.  Their brief story has been on the TV news and in the Metro section.  He was apprehended day before yesterday, attempting to pawn his victim’s jewelry. 

The sanctuary for the memorial service suggested a tent of meeting.  The planks and beams of the West Side Church of Christ rise to a central peak; whence the suspended cluster of lamps casts its light to all corners.  The casket was open for viewing before the service, then closed. The minister entered and processed down the aisle, intoning words of comfort from scripture, followed by three deacons, followed in turn by the family.

During the service, one of the murdered woman’s brothers fled sobbing from the church.  The mother, wracked with grief and crying out her anguish, almost left, supported on the arms of saints and by loud praises from the pulpit, God is good! Thank you Jesus!  And by responding cries from the congregation, Yes, Lord!  Halleluiah!   

With congregational affirmations also, the minister enjoined the family to let go all anger and bitterness, to open their hearts to love and comfort and forgiveness.  I don’t doubt that they did their best, but the most forceful explosion of grief came after a tenor solo assuring us that God marks each sparrow’s fall.

The woman’s name was Tina Walker.  Carolyn often spoke fondly of her, reporting their affectionate jokes and laughter.

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W. D. Timmerman, It Never Changes

The photograph is of the clothes
on Easter:  the two little boys in fedoras,
and young sister and mother in decorative headwear.

The mother is young, beautiful, still
alive.  The father obligatorily smiling.
To be Easter and in Ohio is cool sunshine, if any.

A happy, and yet now sad, old picture.
Just this past Easter I thought of it
and wonder why it never changes.
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