On the Road Again

We take a last look out the narthex window at the hills and stones, and leave this little church. For now. 

Chet checks for spirits in the basement. His shaved patches from the dogbites clearly will remain until the big spring shed. Oh well. Neither of us are perfect any more, if ever we were. 

We'll come back several times this winter. And I want to see it in springtime and summer, too.

The turning of the seasons transforms it all. There is always so much to see. 

By the time we start for home it's snowing pretty good, and the wind is in our faces. Ugh. If there's wind, it seems always to be in our faces.

We get to a dangerous curve that I hate, because cars are always whipping around it and there's no shoulder. As if reading my mind, Chet bounds up the bank to the pasture and rounds the curve in safety on its top. He rejoins me on the straightaway. Good doggie!!

We go up a side lane and perch atop some hayrolls for a different perspective.

Here, I get one of my favorite shots of the winter, a Grandma Moses background with a shivering Boston terrier in the foreground, a few sumac fruit clusters beckoning from stage right. We embrace the season.

But one of us has a warm Dogburger on his mind, and he cracks the whip to get us home.

Fergus' pond isn't frozen yet, but it will be soon. 

The red tower of our house sticks up through the trees, a beacon. But it's still a long ways off.

The little bare pine branch on the left hand tree points right to it.

I like being able to see where I'm headed. I can do that on my runs, at least. Not so much in life any more. 

By the time we make our driveway, Chet's just a determined black dot in the distance. He gets a bit fed up with  my lollygagging and philosophizing when there's snow in his face. I am thankful that he'll come with me at all on such days. He only puts his paw down at cold rain, and more and more, so do I. 

We get home, all rosy and fogged up and freezing. I don't realize until Bill points it out that I'm graying. He snaps a shot, I shake like a dog and call it a run.

Sunday, at Church

We're inside the Waxler Church, just taking in the spirit of the place. Snowlight floods in the windows and I find myself wishing there were a pot-bellied stove to warm it up. I feel the presence of every person who was baptised, married, eulogized, schooled here. I hear their voices echoing in the wooden walls. It is a place charged with life and love and sadness too.

There's no doubt that Chet feels it too. He sniffs and looks everywhere as if he's following leads. 

He does that everywhere he goes, of course. He's does it because he's a dog.  I find it deeply inspiring to explore such places with someone who is completely in the  moment, in the place where he finds himself. He inhabits his reality, instead of drifting off or wishing it were otherwise or thinking about something else entirely unrelated. Chet is in the now, ever in the moment at hand, awake and aware. I strive to be more animal-like. I am drawn to animals, of course, but also to people who can achieve that state of situational awareness, who don't miss a thing that's going on in their surroundings. It's a vanishing art, one that most aren't even aware can be learned and cultivated. 

Dogs are its best practitioners. Watch your dog, see how he goes through his environment, investigating everything as if it were new. If anyone is ever prepared for the second coming, it will be Chet Baker.

He is so like a toddler in his little coat that even I do a double-take when he stands up and looks out the window. Is that a child from the Waxler School, ca. 1915?

In the corner sits an old upright piano. I pretty much know what it will sound like before I roll back the keyboard cover. There are bird droppings on it. The way the photos and documents are lined up on its top reminds me of the piano in my Gram Ruigh's parlor. Sigh. 

Years of piano lessons at skinny Mrs. Ericson's mothball-smelling house, where the couch was covered with plastic and the avocado green drapes were always drawn against the light, have left me with nothing but an unpleasant memory. I never learned to read music because my ear was too good, and it was far too easy for me just to memorize the tunes. But I try to pick out a tune and play a few chords. The freezing old piano sounds like it's somewhere 20 fathoms under the sea, but I love that wavering tone, that nowhere-near tuning. At least for this application. 

The sound is awesome, reverberating around the wooden walls. I'd love to play a Rain Crows gig here.  It doesn't seem so far out of reach, especially in the summertime.

 Finally I give up trying to summon up anything useful from my lessons and just sing "Realms of the Blest," because I want the spirits to hear a song in this space once again. You can hear a snippet of me singing it here. It's Track #5.

It's time to leave this hallowed space. Chet leads the way, into the light.

In a Country Churchyard

I'm amused by the shape of a high-hanging white-faced hornet's nest, echoing that of our enormous light blue watertower behind the scrim of trees. I guess they paint them blue to blend with the sky?

Which they sort of do. White would probably work better for most of the year...these white-sky winters seem to last forever.

We approach the Waxler Church, which sits high atop a hill outside Whipple, Ohio.

When the belltower started to fall down, the community's caretakers (a little band of former parishoners and their descendents) put the bell in a plexi box down front.

A way to keep it from falling through the roof, a way to keep it in memoriam.

To me, it looks like the church's head, displaced.

 The only spots of color are from a little American flag and a blue plastic bucket by the front door.

I know what that bucket is for. It's for spent plastic and silk flowers, which are about the only kind you ever see in these seldom-visited country church burial grounds. 

I circle the graveyard, looking for people I know. The longer I live here the more people I know. I see a former town selectman, and remember the three times he came to visit, once to greet us, once to get our vote, and once to investigate when our neighbor set his natural gas line afire. WHOOOOOMP!!!

Irene walks the roads I run on nice days. She usually has her hands behind her back, and never waves, but she might give me a chin throw sometimes. I don't see her in the winter, but I see her out walking most nice days the rest of the year. She lives alone down a dirt road in a tidy white single-wide. Doesn't have a car, has probably never driven. She used to live in a farmhouse after her husband died, but it burned down. The neighbors take care of her every need. This simple fact amazes me. She has no one else, so they bring her food and check on her every day. She's six years younger than my mother. Phoebe and I decide to bring her something on her birthday, which is coming right up. Her stone awaits.

Behind her rests Bessie Morganstern. She used to live in a white farmhouse on the corner of our road. I never knew her, but I knew her grandson Gary. Gary hunted everything, ate everything that walked, crawled or flew through these woods and fields. I wrote about Gary, even recorded an NPR commentary about him. The farmhouse is gone now, but daffodils push up through the smooth haymeadow each spring where it was.

I peer in, and the ghostly outline of the graveyard is overlain on the pews within.

I'm surprised to find the door secured only by a rubber bungee cord. I help myself inside.

These were German immigrants who built and attended this little church, which later became a schoolhouse, as many of them did.

Photos hang on the walls, undisturbed in the frigid cold. My dad would have been three years old when this photo was taken in 1915.

I roll the old-fashioned names around in my mouth. Gertrude, Bessie, Gladys, Luvada, Erma, Elver, Clessent. Names you don't hear any more. I wonder if they will ever come back. I somehow can't see them fighting their way past the Kaylas and Klaceys, the Briannas and Baileys of today. 

We make our way to the front, to what amounts to an altar.

There is a bouquet of silk flowers there, and in the bouquet someone has stuck a dark feather.

I am happy to inform you that it once rode the thermals in the wing of a turkey vulture, my totem bird. 

O person who put it here, thank you, for whoever you are, with your simple gesture you have made my day.

 I wonder if you knew it was a vulture's plume. 

Doubting it, but shivering with the perfection of it all anyway. 

Country Churchyard

It's warming up. A little bit. It's in the low 40's lately. And there have been peeks of sun. The peas I planted so hopefully in mid-March are six inches tall,  growing in a strangle in their planters in the greenhouse. It's still too cold to set them out. It's going to be a thing, untangling their roots and trying to set them out. I've never started peas in the greenhouse before. Maybe it's simply not done. I'll find out soon enough. It'll work or it won't.

I have some nice snow pictures and I'd better hurry up and get them posted before, you know, daffodils burst forth and birds start building their nests in the freezing cold, because they can't wait any longer.

Lately when it snows I take off with  my camera. It may just be on the way to town, but I'll take the back roads and shoot. These spring snows don't last long and I love them for that, and for the sudden lace they throw over everything.

I wonder if anyone is still planting catalpa trees. They seem like relicts of a bygone time. Does anyone say,  hmm, I'd like to have a catalpa in my yard?

There's a little church perched high above Stanleyville that I've always wanted to peek into. I can think of only one of these tiny country churches that's still used, and that's Lower PawPaw Methodist farther up the road. Sometimes you can hear the bells from our house on Sunday morning. This one's sitting silent. Such a nice building, it's a shame someone doesn't use it. Such churches stand witness to the old graves all around them. Nobody tears them down until they literally fall apart, but even then the graveyards are sacred and left untouched. I'm glad for that. They have a purpose, even if all their inhabitants are forgotten by most.

What a view these people have. I wonder if they rise like smoke up out of their graves and sit and look at it just before sunrise and sunset. I would. 

The older cemeteries are full of Germans from the Old Country, their inscriptions auf Deutsch.

In the mowing and the frost heaves, some stones inevitably get dislodged, displaced, orphaned. What you do then is lean them up against the church.

There's a moment of blue before the clouds close in again.

I snatch it

and peek in the window to see the cold still pews, waiting. These are nicer than most, with the curved sides.

I watch the winter light play across the landscape.

This would be nice to paint, with its limited palette. I forget how much country there is around here, how it just goes on forever, and how little of it I've explored. There's always something nice waiting when I do.

I peek in the trash can and find used lilies. So someone remembers and puts fake flowers out, and thinks to throw them away when they fade.

I turn for home and pass the dairy farm, little plastic igloos waiting for the calves who are separated from their mothers and fed from bottles as soon as they're born. Sigh. What a weird way to raise a calf, with a plastic outhouse and a bottle for a mother, never to know the loving scrub of her rough tongue on its skin. Imagine carrying a baby to term and then having it taken from you so you can keep being milked. It's a wonder they don't lose their minds, both mother and calf. Maybe they do.

 I'm thankful for fields and broken skies to look out over.

At home that morning, I couldn't see past the bird screen on my studio windows.

but out here, everything's lace.

My favorite shot of the day, an old truck and a redtail. You can hardly see him, but he's the black dot in the leftmost tree.

I've decided spring isn't coming this year. That way, it'll feel like a bonus when it does.