Adams Rd.

I saw a parcel of land for sale for a solid sum. In the photo advertising, a large oak tree stood next to a shabby white house with ivy growing up the trunk.  I think I would give the whole sum for one oak tree if my bank account obliged.  Massive limb-arms made of strength and integrity and wood; great limbs stretch horizontal far.  And when any oak hangs its massive limbs low, like the giant arms of my father, for a daughter or a son of Adam to climb up, a transaction is made that can never be revoked. 

No one has ever forgotten climbing about on an oak limb, nor the feeling of bark against the skin; legs dangling over the earth, one would go even higher--knees pressed into the ridges struggling for ascent, blood rushing under the skin, and a breeze igniting a sense of losing the bonds of the earth. 

Adams Road, Ozark. 

 

The Town Bird

One day I suddenly came to town and slept under a town sky, under a shingled town roof, and beneath a white chenille bedspread I bought in the town.  When I woke, the sound of the rooster was far off in the country and I couldn't hear him and his rousing reverence to the rising sun.  The luscious red cardinal perched in the oak tree beside the worn country porch was singing without my daily delight in him. The mockingbirds and blue jays, the crows and the doves were charging the air and the nuthatch was still making his funny sound like a rubber duck smashed under foot, but without me to laugh at him.

It seemed to me the town boasted only the sounds of men and women moving mindlessly about in cars, passing me by under the white chenille bedspread, and the church bells kept telling us all its time to move on.  But where was the morning song?  Where was the chickadee wearing his tidy black cap and sounding so sweet like the high-low squeak of an old teeter-totter in need of oiling? And who was going to call up the sun when not a rooster was allowed under this strange town sky?   And so my heart was grieved for the country birds because I didn't hear their familiar, soul-feeding song that assured me that this world in the country was the most beautiful world of all.

Spring quickly turned to summer who yawned slowly into a broadening autumn and nothing much had changed.  I walked in the town yard behind the house where I slept and noted the squirrels jumping from tree to tree. One ambitious fellow carried a discarded apple high into the sugar berry tree and losing his grip, dropped it, landing with a thud just in front of me.   I walked along the city sidewalks, passing the shop that sold cigarettes and tobacco, sometimes stopping on the bridge to watch the fish swim in the creek below, and always slowing to regard the antique roses that hung pink and rosy in the yard of the 1st Baptist church.  Somewhere in my moving about I began to pause at the sound of the church bells tolling out the hour and I began to feel grateful and reposed.

And then one morning, waking under the town roof, under the dark and sleepy town sky,  I heard a sound I hadn't noticed before.  It came from the the south, from the river's edge and broke open my town life with the same sweetness of the country bird's song that once called up the joy of each brand new day.  For just like the birds, the sound rang out from the depths of Truth, Wisdom and from the sure Hope for the future.

  And within the new sound I heard these words:

"Here is the new sound.  Hear the sound for a new season and a new time. Can you not perceive it?"  

And under the town sky a heart now stirs at the sound of the train whistle calling from the river's edge and assuring that my world is the most beautiful of all still.

And surely I am with you always...... Matthew 28:20