SHADOWS

   

    Winter hasn’t shown itself in Sasquatch Springs as of yet, save for a morning or two of frost.
Despite the mild attitude of the season, Orval feels weather in his bones.  Two days -  maybe three,  would find the farm in a thin blanket of snow.  Not a big storm, but a cold one.  It’s promise is confirmed when he climbs the porch steps and is caught by a stiffness in his knees.
    Finished for now with the chore, Orval wipes the pine sap from his hands with his kerchief.   Gray days of the calendar require that his rocking chair share space on the front porch with a cord of wood.  He studies his kerchief for a moment in regret, realizing that the pine sap will cause the ire of his wife. A steaming mug of coffee is waiting on the porch rail for him.
    “Orval, give me that hanky,” she scolds, opening the screen door.
    “I knew you were hiding there inside the door, watching me the whole time,” he lies, handing over his kerchief.
    “If that wood’s sappy, it won’t burn proper.”  She says this every year.
    “I’ve sworn my life to keep you from the elements, Ruby -- I don’t believe I’ve failed you yet.”
    “Drink your coffee, Orval.”
    Ruby watches her husband grasp the coffee mug with hands that have always been indifferent to life’s little hardships, the scolds and scrapes that punctuate the history of a strong man who handles the world with a tough integrity.  She doesn’t see the glimmer of pain that walks across his face as he sits himself in his rocker, or maybe she has just grown accustomed to the many expressions that long lives cast.
    “I think I’ll just sit a spell out here,” he says, “ and watch the morning slip away.”
    “I’d guess that a grown man would have better things to do than ponder away a useful morning,” she teases.      Ruby knows that if any man deserves to sit a spell and enjoy a clear Autumn morning, that man would be her husband.  But a good lick or two at his temperament kept a spark in Orval’s blood stream and thus, in their marriage.    Ruby considered it required maintenance, and maybe a bit ‘old fashioned’ in opinion, but  her job as a wife as well.  Her husband embraced it all with a cheerful expectation.  They both were too long into their lives together to be fooling each other.  What mattered was the vitality of their marriage, a union that has weathered through the storms for more than  half of a century.
    “Well, if the world stops spinning, you come and fetch me.  I’ll be right here in this rocking chair.”  His proclamation follows his wife through the door, garnering no response.  She is already half-way to the kitchen, her mind moved on to Christmas baking.
                    *            *            *
    Orval’s tranquility is cut short by his eldest son  Walter, whose sudden appearance at the porch steps startles a fart out of the old man.
    “Does that mean that you’re glad to see me or did you have oatmeal for breakfast again?”
    “We’re both lucky it’s just dust,” says Orval.  “Don’t you have something better to do than scare an old man half-to-death?”
    “Y-y-y-your mood sounds as sour as your plumbing,” Walter laughs.
    “Hey,  I’m just sitting here, minding my own business.”  Both men laugh together.
    Walter migrated back to the homeplace, as the rest of the family had, for the Thanksgiving holiday.  An unfortunate victim of corporate down sizing, he thought that he would stay on with the ‘old folks’ through to the new year and maybe gather some assembly and direction for his life. As they raised him, Orval and Ruby had instilled in their first born various reasons for reaching beyond the fences of the farm to find a future.  Walter looked at his father now and saw some of those reasons:  “You look really  tired, Dad.”  
    Walter’s comment is offered in a kind manner.  That his Father is a broken -down old man is a fact that does not necessarily need to be aired out on the clothes line of conversation.  Walter himself is no longer a spring chicken and would, after a beer or three, reluctantly concede to being past his prime.
    “I’m an old man,” Orval dodders, “an old man who just moved a cord of wood without the assistance of his favorite son.”  He begins shaking himself about, for extra effect.
    “You pitchin’ a palsy fit isn’t going to make me feel any more guilty than I already feel.”
    “Well, where were you?  I could’a had a stroke or something - been lain out here on the porch and all.  What a thing for your Mother to find.”  Orval can barely contain himself.  He loves his son dearly, but he just can’t resist taking advantage of his descent nature.
    “I might still expire,” Orval continues without mercy.  “There might be a clot or something, right now as I’m speaking, just ready to shoot up into my lung - or my brain.  Hell, it might take a few hours to break loose in my veins!  I might still be in danger!  I could wake up dead tomorrow morning!”
    “Well, Dad, I’ll miss you.”
    “Really son?  Do ya swear?”
    “On any God you can find that’s still older than you, Dad.”
    This feels good, Walter thinks.  Their laughter dances across the morning and for a few moments, it colors over the darkness that life seems determined to slip into.  Between his Mother’s illness and the economy squeezing him out of his career,  Walter’s world has spun into un-charted space at a time when he thought that he’d be planning his retirement.
    “It’s a little late in the game for me to start growing calices on my hands, Dad.”
    That big grin that hung over Walter’s childhood suddenly flashes across his Father’s face.
    “I’ll be go-to-hell if I could figure out how me and yer Momma raised a city boy,” Orval teases.
    “It’s one of life’s mysteries, Dad,” Walter muses.  In fact it has been an ongoing joke for most of his adult life.  But it was on the well heeded advice of his parents that he took to the books rather than the plow.  This was back in the days when folks could tell their children that they could grow up to be anything they wanted to be and they wouldn’t be lying.  Walter himself worked hard and caught opportunities that had eluded the grasp of his Father in his early days.  He made a good life for himself, despite a messy divorce and an auto accident that left him in a coma for six days.  More important than anything else in Walter’s heart  was the respect of his Father, a man who fought fires, fixed engines and even broke horses to help support his family when farming lay shallow.  Father or not, the respect of such a man is a priceless asset in life.
    “You know, I just realized that I don’t know how old you really are anymore, old man.”
    “Old enough to be your Daddy, I reckon.”
    “Well, you use to be twice as old as me.  As I recall, when I was twenty-five, you were fifty years old.  Now, you’re old - but you aren’t a hundred-something years old,” Walter figures.
    “You’re getting older faster than I am.”  Says Orval.
    The good humor of the morning echoes off into the promise of another afternoon, where rarely does a day on the farm rent an empty lease on the seasons.  
     And in the shadow cast by the father, the son reflects the man.

                    Dedicated to cjForeman    
    






    

GRAVITY

    This is a repost from last week.  It is not my intention of slamming the boards with reposts and I apologize.  While attempting to 'redo' the site all the posts were accidently deleted.  Okay,  I clicked where I should have clucked.  I want to thank the great editors and techs at PNN for their prompt service and hard work addressing my goof.  Really, great work people.  But alas, in my arrogance and genius, no sooner were my posts ressurected by PNN's excellent staff, did I not (yes, I did) delete the entire shabang again.  (Whoops - did I say that out-loud?!)  I am reposting Gravity  per a request by a reader, not in personal vanity.
I want to thank everyone who has stopped by the Front Porch for a spell or two.  (Gone are the comments with the posts)  I cannot express in words what this means to me.  Life is a struggle these days and PNN is one of the few bright spots.  I want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.  Health & Happiness to you and yours.  Be safe. -- Your humble narrator

    Reflections of Christmas’s past gather dust in cardboard boxes which once held the useful things that life collects.  There they wait, deep in the hallway closet where their presence can’t interfere with the normal tools of a household; objects taken for granted  until their obituaries are published in the shopping list magnetized to the fridge.
    Every once in a while something needed is not where it should be and the tired boxes will bare from the shadows, only to be quickly cursed for their out of season glory and  bulkiness.  Whatever memories they may promise for Winter, in the warmer months they are merely squatters on space better imagined for attic treasures maybe, or rafter refugees from the garage.
    In the convenience of technology the world has grown smaller.  Gone are the magnificent mysteries that children wandered through.  Myths are dispelled with an arrogant click of the mouse.  Legends are manufactured, not grown, and then are sold to the highest bidder.  Heroes long gone are technically resurrected to sell soda and pickup trucks.
    Then once a year those bruised and battered boxes in the closet are pulled out and opened.  The gravity contained within is thin now, but the ornaments that decorate life hold their own atmosphere.  The weight of time.   
    Suddenly, it doesn’t matter if Internet search engines file God under fiction.
It doesn’t matter if a 17 year old proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Santa Claus could never possess the propulsion system to cover this planet in one night. 
For a few weeks every year, what is, and what could be, share the same orbit.
    As when, a long time ago, ( a long, long time ago, says the 17 year old), a little boy riding home from Grandma and Grandpa’s house in the back seat of a Mustang with his little brothers on Christmas Eve, listening to Santa Reports on the AM radio and wiping away the condensation  on the window, in hopes of maybe catching a glimpse of a glowing red nose in the night sky.
    A long time ago.  When the world was still big.  When magic was still real.