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for Mama and Daddy

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My morning prayers lately end in tears, almost every time. They flow more freely each day, becoming a deluge. I pray for people I love, for our leaders, and for those I scrap with on Facebook. I ask forgiveness for my complacency and ignorance and inertia and my tendency to believe the lie that all I have is mine because somehow I deserve it. I pray the same prayer for our country, grateful for the goodness of our citizens and soldiers and those who care about law and the truth, while begging for clarity and honesty and justice. And forgiveness.

I believe in forgiveness, that it comes from God, who stands so ready to forgive He was proactive about it.

And I believe in miracles. Forgiveness is a miracle.

My friend Gerald Smith helps me keep perspective. He grew up on a Virginia farm with no running water. He has written a new poem and graciously allowed me to share it with you.

Place

In the country there was no power
No lights, stove, microwave, TV
We got news when we did at the store
Grandpa would listen by the counter
When he stopped for gas or kerosene
In the house we talked or read
Grandma had a Bible and an old catalog
Sometimes there was a small letter
No more than a note on thin blue paper
Farm was life to itself each day
Hogs, chickens, squirrels, gardens
Endless fire tending, and cooking
We lived quietly without distraction
We lived without the hyped anxiety of news
The war merited “Things are bad over there,”
Before Grandma turned back to her flour bowl
The circle has been long but I have returned
Going on now years ago I turned off my TV
NPR succumbed to its predictable repetition years before
There is no news—or it is ever the same:
Politicians are lying; people are dying.
Ever, ever, and ever again
How much more of madness and horror do I need?
My evenings are quiet again. 
A book. A candle on the table.
Silence, blessed divine, heavenly silence
I neither rage nor fear
I do not spew hatred around me
This evening I read dear Wendell,
                “There is a day
                When the road neither
                Comes nor goes, and the way
                Is not a way but a place.”
I am a boy again.  The road has led me home.

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Over Christmas we visited my folks in Newnan, Georgia where I took care of something that has bothered me for many years. Did you know they make these contraptions that allow modern folks like us to scan old slides, the ones dropped into those grey plastic carousels, covered in dust and mouse droppings unless stored in the orange box? This one set me back just under $200. It was worth it.

Below is a small sampling of unearthed memories, all well before Wesley, the fifth little Budd, came along. After fifty years, I can smell that Brahman bull and Daddy’s sweat, our Shepherd puppy Sophie, the calf’s milk, the chlorine, Grandmother’s slightly musty and soup-warmed house, and the wet cardboard box on the rare snow. I can hear the animals and the music and Grandmother’s reading Mother Goose and the laughter.

CLICK EACH PHOTO TO ENLARGE

These are some of the people I’ve loved most in this world. Stories are told in their hands:

Candler and Bryant in the hay. About three beside a river, I need a face washing.

Dorothy and Candler sit on the porch swing. When I look at them today, I still see them this way.

Granddaddy Budd takes Dorothy and me out to the pasture to meet a newborn calf

Dorothy in her Easter dress dithers on the pool house threshold. My dress matched in pink to her yellow. We believe Mama sewed them for us. Daddy appears too pensive to be lounging. I wonder what he was thinking about.

Dorothy dressed as a doll

Smith’s poem struck me with themes that resonate with what I’d already been writing. Here’s my latest, inspired by the slides:

Carnival Slideshow Acrostic

Come, hop on my turning carousel of memory
Arching horses bob like little pistons circling
Ride through boundless summer wind, whistling calliope
Over half a century returns through Kodachrome
Uplighting hazy slides, their smiles, the porch swing—Home
Sagittal or axial, each slice is history
Eternally reflected in its luminosity 
Layers of joy forgotten—but not lost—to layers of grief.

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And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.

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The hawk’s trajectory flows with the current in a circle. It’s a turnstile that allows us through when we reach the front of the line and that “unknown, remembered gate.” Our memories return through scratches on the slides sliced into the Kodak carousel spinning like a record, and the scratches on the vinyl don’t obscure but bring forward our old songs. The horses bob and the carousel turns.

Grandma turns back to her flour bowl.

The circle, however long, will return us home.

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Six New Poems by Wendell Berry in last month’s edition of Plough

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