awe

Rainbow reminder

/ Fran Haley / 14 Comments

a pantoum

At the rainbow’s appearing
just stop to savor;
all the cares of this troubled world,
you can endure.

Just stop to savor
how the light bends into glory.
You can endure
the storms of life.

How the light bends into glory!
Look up and be awed.
The storms of life
for a moment, disappearing.

Look up and be awed—
all the cares of this troubled world
for a moment, disappearing
at the rainbow’s appearing.

Rainbow over my neigborhood after a storm last week.
Note the forsythia beginning to bloom.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the March Slice of Life Story Challenge

Turning the page

/ Fran Haley / 2 Comments

February is nearly gone.

I flip the page in my daily planner to find this image on the March tab:

I am still, in contemplation of the message.

First thought: The Bible verse that has repeatedly reverberated throughout my life, ever since a youth minister gave me a plaque that hung on my bedroom wall during my teenage years: Psalm 46:10, Be still and know that I am God. The rest of which reads: I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.

A reminder that I can see so little of the big picture of events, why they unfold the way they do, and that I must trust even as life’s story takes dark and twisting turns. Even so, there’s awe to be found. Always. I am not the author of life, not even my own. Someday it will end, as it does for us all. In the meantime…living well means finding this stillness every day. Tapping into the underlying currents of perspective and meaning…here’s where writing becomes an invaluable gift. Sometimes you can’t know what you think or feel until you begin to write.

Within that stillness eventually comes gratitude for the gift of life itself, imperfect as it is. To what or whom is this gratitude directed? For me: God. Whatever sadness, mourning, grief, anger, irritation, guilt, worry that gnaws at my soul, it is stilled to submission, releases its hold, even evaporates like smoke in the wind, in my awe of God. Another verse: Luke 1:37, Nothing is impossible with God.

I know it to be true. When I was a teenager, I could never have envisioned my life now. I was an unlikely candidate for a minister’s wife. Today, my sons serve as pastor and church musician.

Awe. Awe. Awe.

I contemplate the illustration on my planner page. Living things are woven into the words Be still. The upper flowers appear to be cosmos, the Greek meaning orderly, harmonious; the opposite of chaos. These flowers attract pollinators which perpetuate life (note the butterfly). The garden cosmos is often symbolic of knowledge, beauty, and happiness. Be still and know…

The bottom bloom might be Italian leather flower, a form of clematis. A plant app tells me it was the first climbing vine introduced into the garden of Queen Elizabeth I. It has come to represent wisdom, royalty, high aspirations. I look at this bloom, with its leathery-strong petals, and think of resilience. Pereverance. Endurance. Faithfulness. Reliance.

The flower in the center, the least noticeable, seems to be sweet pea. It stands for goodbyes. And thank yous.

This journey called Life is inevitably strewn with pain, with loss, with goodbyes; yet along the path, if we will remember to stop and be still, we can find the sprouts of gratitude. The good is blossoming despite all. In the stillness, maybe only in the stillness, we can breathe that fragrance deep, and be strengthened.

Just the reminder I needed.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

Glorious

/ Fran Haley / 12 Comments

Last Friday, in preparation for the advancing winter storm, our school system dismissed three hours early.

This gift, so to speak, would take an unexpected and exponential turn.

Driving along brine-dusted backroads many thoughts crowded my mind…concerns about work, about people in my life who are facing battles…all I really wanted was to get home, to rest, to feel hopeful for a little snow, as we’d gone over a thousand days without any measurable snowfall. My granddaughter Micah, age three, has only seen flurries on a mountain vacation. She’s never made a snowman.

It’s hard to remember exactly what my thoughts were as I rounded the bend where a patch of woods borders a field:

I glimpse the body of the deer by the roadside. Bright pink innards exposed, the only shock of color in the entire brown-gray landscape… when suddenly there are wings extended wide, curled at the ages…

Buzzard, says my brain. I see them all the time. But in that instant, a flash of white.

An eagle. An eagle. An eagle. Rising on its mighty wings, barely three feet away.

Oh oh oh.

I don’t know how I know, I just do: it’s not really flying away.

I’ve already passed, so I stop the car to look in the rearview mirror.

It’s still there. Plain as day, back at the carcass.

Only one thing to do…

I drive a short distance for the first safe place to turn around. Happens to be a tiny church tucked into the woods. I pull onto its driveway – broken concrete, in need of repair – and call my husband while circling round:

You won’t belive what I just saw – an eagle by the road! Eating a deer!

Wow…you better keep your eyes on the road. Be careful.

That’s just it, though. I WAS keeping my eyes on the road.

I am still keeping my eyes on the road, going back…

It’s still there.

I know I can’t get too close or it will fly again.

No other cars are coming down the road in either direction, so I get a short video:

Apologies for the erratic movement…

The video doesn’t capture the magnificence of the bird, and I wish I could have recorded it taking flight, the incredible majesty and grace of it, like some kind of winged dancer… I had to move on before someone came around the bend and found me stopped in their path.

I took the next road on the left…

The name of it, on a green street sign: Glory Road.

One more time I passed the field, slowly. One more time I saw the eagle, just as a school bus came along behind me…I had to keep going, but could see, in a quick rearview mirror check, that the bus had slowed. Not because of me; there was plenty of distance between us. Not to make a drop-off, either.

I am sure that bus was full of children who, like me, paused to see the eagle for a moment, so close, so huge, rising on its glorious wings.

Right there in sight of Glory Road.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Writing Challenge

Note: Eagles primarily eat fish. In winter, when fish are harder to come by, eagles will eat roadkill. I almost entitled this post “Provision.”

Three song

/ Fran Haley / 7 Comments

for my granddaughter

When I tell you your story
in all the years to come
you will remember
bits and pieces
on your own

because Three
records memory

I will tell you of these days
my own autumn
in which you paint
infinite points of opal-fire
against charcoal-ash sky

because Three
is alchemy

I will tell you how my heart sings
at sight of you running
as hard as you can
your little arms held out
to me, to me

because Three
is utter glee

And I will tell you how I listen
as still as I can be
when you sing snippets
of hymns…
oh, always, always abide with me

beautiful Three
ever holy

love you forever, Micahroni – Franna

*******

with thanks to Linda Mitchell for hosting Spiritual Journey Thursday writers with this invitation: “As we enter Native American Heritage Month I ask that you respond to Joy Harjo’s Fall Song in any way that makes your heart happy.”

Our two granddaughters make my heart and Grandpa’s as happy, and as awed, as they have ever been. We pray thanksgiving every day.

The apparition

/ Fran Haley / 9 Comments

I can’t sleep.

Don’t know why. Not anxious or worried. No thoughts churning.

After an hour or two of tossing and turning, I give up.

I toss the covers, grab my robe (plush emerald green, floor-length, with a hood; wearing it makes me feel like an ancient Celt).

Don’t need to turn on the hallway lights. There’s already light. Thin and silvery, from the blind-occluded windows. The moon is waxing. Hunter’s Moon and supermoon in the making, the biggest and brightest of the year.

The heat comes on for the first time this season. New HVAC system hardly makes a sound. Just the faintest hum.

Don’t know why I peek through the blinds of the kitchen window, toward the east. Habit? Curiosity? Expectancy? This is where I recently saw the nutria, a thing I never saw before, out in the yard by the birdbath. In daylight, though. What should be here in these predawn hours?

No creatures, but the stars above are spectacular.

Mars and Jupiter are easy to spot. Orion’s belt, three brilliant rhinestones. Sirius, the Dog Star, brightest of all, seems to be calling…

The pull is immense. 2:15 a.m. is too early to be so wide awake and far too early to be outside, but why not go see what I can see?

I turn on the back deck light for moment to be sure no creatures are afoot (say, a nutria, a skunk, a coyote; granted, I’ve not seen the latter in my backyard, but they’re known to be around).

No creatures. I switch off the light and slip out into the chilly stillness, glad of my heavy robe.

The moon peeks through the tops of tall pines. If it were not obscured, I could read a book by its silver-white radiance.

For a minute I play with my Skyview phone app, identifying constellations and stars with which I am not so familiar (Procyon, in Canis Minor; its name means before the dog. I like this. I’ve been trying to convince my husband to get a puppy since Dennis the dachshund moved out with our newlywed son).

Then I just listen. The night is so still about me. Close. Hushed. Breathless. Again that word comes to mind: Expectancy. In the distance, the low hooting of an owl.

Right about then is when I see movement above the trees in the eastern sky. Something gliding from the south.

A pale outline, conical, almost like the nose of a blimp. That’s my first thought: Blimp.

I can only see the nose. The rest is shrouded.

White-veiled, ethereal, sailing northward above the horizon… a giant ghost ship navigating the sky.

—What am I seeing?

I manage to shoot a quick video:

I want to follow it, to see where it goes, but it’s quickly gone.

I need to know.

Back in the house, I start researching comets. Surely that’s what this is? I have never seen anything like it. The video doesn’t capture the enormity of it nor its spiritlike quality.

Turns out that comets are predicted this week. In astronomy, their sighting is referred to as an apparition. Fitting. This apparition doesn’t seem to match the descriptions I’m reading. I learn that there’s supposed to be an Orionid meteor shower caused by the tail of Halley’s Comet in a few days, but the comet itself isn’t supposed to be visible again until 2061.

The universe plays by its own rules. Dances to its own inner tune. I missed the aurora borealis last week, the northern lights flinging their colorful fringes this far south, and I was saddened. One day, I’m determined, I shall see them in all their wild, diaphonous glory.

For the moment, I’ll be trying to solve the mystery of the heavenly body I saw on this cold, still morning when I could not sleep and was drawn to the exact spot at the exact time to witness its appearing.

Awed to my very bones.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge
(my experience this morning reminds me that writing is also about
showing up to see what comes)

My last hummingbird

/ Fran Haley / 7 Comments

She’s still here.

As of yesterday evening, anyway, after I went out in the rain to refill the almost-empty hummingbird feeder.

One little female, silvery-cream, with the faintest dark speckling on her breast.

Upon my return to the house, I stand a few feet back from the window in the unlit kitchen, and —zip! —she appears like a fairy out of nowhere. She perches on the feeder (attached to my window with a suction cup hanger), gripping the thin red rim with unspeakably tiny feet. Her back appears gray in the dusk but I know how it shimmers in the sunlight: gold-dusted, olive-green, smooth as glass. Ethereal. I marvel at the exotic lining around her eye. For a moment, I forget to breathe.

For several days prior, she and another hummingbird were fighting like mad for possession of the feeder. Clearly a high-stakes frenzy. Remarkably loud squeaking. Palpable urgency. Throughout the summer, four or more of them kept vying for a turn. They do not share. They drive each other away. Each bird has her own unique markings, but the astonishing speed of movement sometimes makes individual identification impossible. Except for the one female with a rare dot of red at her throat. Fancy.

Ornithologists say that male ruby-throats return first each spring, but my first hummingbird sighting this year, at the outset of April, was a female. I pushed up the kitchen blinds one chilly morning and there she was, right before my eyes, hovering for a split second before darting away. I caught the implied question: Ummm…where’s my nectar?!

I like to think it was this same female. The first to arrive. The last to leave.

I wonder why she lingers.

It’s mid-September. The males left at the end of August. Punctually. I saw the last one on the last day of the month: A male perched on the feeder, his black ascot turning to crimson-fire whenever he lifted his head. I watched him take his fill of sugar-water. I noted the date. By Labor Day, I knew that was it. He’d gone, as if in keeping with the calendar page flipping or an inner alarm clock going off: Ding! Male hummingbirds vanish all at once. Now you see them, now you don’t. Poof.

Females remain for a few more weeks. I’ve sensed that mine have been leaving, one by one, in the last few days. Off to Mexico or Central America or wherever they winter. I am curious about where my birds go. I am certain each goes to its own exact spot; there’s no shadow of turning with hummingbirds.

I’ve read of their long, lonely, exhausting migration, but I can’t imagine hummingbirds ever feeling sorry for themselves. Prosaic writers have described them as “made of air” and “tricks of light” — I love the lyricality.  I also know that the hummingbird’s fragile appearance belies a tenacity and ferocity unrivaled by any other bird around, even the huge red-shouldered hawk that sits so majestically on our power lines and poles, scrutinizing the landscape for prey.

Last week I heard the cries of a hawk. I went out on my porch to listen and was rewarded with the sight of two red-shouldered hawks flying, one after the other, in the patch of tall pine woods across my street. I suspect there’s a nest nearby. While I stood gazing in awe, there came a sudden vibration: vvvvRRRR! A female hummingbird materialized to hover three feet away from my face, her wings beating like tiny fan blades on high.

I said, Oh it’s you.

I feel sure she was saying the same thing.

We seem to be equally curious about each other.

Maybe she was the one that still lingers, my last hummingbird.

She won’t stay much longer.

In the predawn hours, with a rainstorm raging and my electricity out, it’s too dark to see anything beyond my window except for the feeder. It still holds. Freshly replenished. I will ensure that it remains so for as long as my hummingbird should have need of it.

When she’s gone, I’ll experience a little autumnal pang of loss, the expected but unwanted shedding, the indefinable ache of transition, the instinctive pulling-inward preparation against the coming cold and dark. For a time. A season.

Until the morning I push up my blinds and we meet face-to-face once more.

 Godspeed, precious spark.

*******

With thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

and to the hummingbird that remains
even now, in the wind and rain
while I write

Easter echoes

/ Fran Haley / 20 Comments

Easter morning. I am six. My little sister is four. We’ve torn apart our Easter baskets. The green plastic grass is strewn all over and we’ve eaten the heads off our hollow chocolate bunnies. We didn’t go to church because Mama isn’t feeling well. She has trouble with her back and sits in traction for a while every day, in a chair by the bedroom with her chin in a sling that hangs from the top of the door. I am in the kitchen when the phone rings and she comes to answer it.

Oh no, she says. Oh, no. She starts to cry. Tears stream down her cheeks.

Listening to her side of the conversation with her friend from church, I learn that our pastor died this morning. At church. Standing at the pulpit to give his sermon when he sank to the floor. People thought at first he was kneeling to pray, strange for a Baptist, but…it is Easter…

In the days to come, the church people will comfort each another by saying this is exactly how he’d have wanted to go.

*******

Easter morning. I am eighteen. I’m not in church. I quit going a few years ago. I have been cutting my college classes more and more to run with my colorful theater crowd. I’ve decided to make my living perfoming on stage. It’s all I care about. My aunt, Mama’s sister who never married nor had children, says I’m “caught between the moon and New York City.” Deep down I know this is not the best that I can do: I don’t want to be at home anymore, I’m not getting along with my father, my grandmother is worried about me. I know she prays, because…

I have lost my way.

*******

Easter morning. I am nineteen. I am not in church, but I’m looking at a card that arrived at the end of the week. A beautiful Easter card from Miss Margaret. I didn’t know she had my address. I met her during my recent hospital stay, when I ran a high fever with a virus and needed an IV. Miss Margaret was my roommate. A large Black lady with a beautiful smile and a voice as warm as as a blanket. She was in for a mastectomy. She’d asked me, just before I left and before she went for surgery: Do you go to church?

No, ma’am, not like I should…(I didn’t say not at all).

Hmm, she replied. That young man who’s come to see you. Brought you those flowers. Have you been going out with him for long?

No, ma’am. I haven’t been out with him at all yet, actually. I got sick on the day of our first date and ended up here instead…it was also opening night of the play we were both in and I missed that, too.

What I didn’t tell Miss Margaret is that I was afraid the guy would give up on me…but he hadn’t, yet.

She nodded. Listen to me, Child. You are young. Watch out for yourself, hear? He seems a nice young man. You ought to get yourself back to church.

So here I am on Easter morning, not in church, looking at this card she mailed me… an Easter prayer signed Love and Blessings Always from Miss Margaret, P.S. I’m doing fine.

II wonder: Is it too late to get to church today?

I call my boyfriend.

*******

Easter morning. I am twenty-one. I’ve come back to my childhood church with my husband…the guy who didn’t give up on me when I got sick and missed our first date as well as opening night of the community theater production we were both performing in…a play entitled “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” We’ve been married for a year and a half, we’re both working, we just left our one-bedroom apartment for a new townhouse, first time homeowners. Up until these last months, we thought we would move to New York and pursue acting careers. I’ve been accepted to The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and they have allowed me a grace period to come….if we can figure out how we are going to afford to live there.

But my husband has recently told me: Honey…we need to talk.

And then he just says it: I know God’s calling me to preach.

His beautiful face is so earnest. I tell him the only thing I know to say: If He’s really calling you, then you have to try.

The huge sanctuary is packed today. Hundreds of people. The pastor has been here for fifteen years, the successor of the one who died here on that long-ago Easter morning. Today he preaches from Acts 17, Paul addressing the Areopagus on the resurrection of Christ; Paul is mocked, but one man and one woman are called out here in the passage by name for joining him in belief: Dionysious and Damaris.

When the pastor offers the invitation, I grab my husband’s hand: We are rededicating our lives today.

We walk the aisle. In all that crowd, we are the only ones who do: One man, one woman.

I tell my pastor that my husband is called to preach.

He will take him under his wing, the fifty-third and final young man he ordains to the ministry.

He will tell us later: It won’t be easy; I had to step into the pulpit of a man who died there. But the Lord will provide. He always comes through…sometimes at last minute when you are thinking all is lost, but He always comes through.

Then he’ll look at me: You were in my teen Bible School class, I recall. It’s been a while. I remember you coming to church with your mother when you were a child. Your dad didn’t attend and your mother didn’t drive.

Yes, sir. That’s right. My dad works most Sundays. Mama didn’t drive. She’s just recently gotten her license.

He will nod: You walked to church until we got our bus ministry started. Your mother was the first person to sign up for it.

I didn’t know that.

*******

Easter morning. I am twenty-five. Life is a blur with a baby boy to care for. I meant to change the old wreath hanging on the front of the parsonage, over by the wide porch swing. When the weather is warmer I will sit here and sing to him, but right now it’s still a little chilly, with the beach breezes blowing up from the bay. Before we go to church, I will put up the Easter wreath. Better late than never.

When I reach for the tattered old wreath, a bird flies out, startling me. There’s a nest in it, with babies cheeping… I had no idea.

Awed by the discovery of brand-new life on this particular morning, I let it be.

I save the new Easter wreath for next year.

*****

Easter afternoon. I am thirty. My family is gathered at the Baptist church in Daddy’s hometown for the funeral of his sister, my aunt. She was fifty-four, spent the last years of her short life in a nursing home, bedridden with mutliple sclerosis. For all of these years my grandmother drove a sixty-mile round trip each week to visit, taking her daughter’s soiled laundry home and returning it fresh and clean, and trimming her nails because the nursing staff said they weren’t allowed to.

Beside her in the pew, Daddy is pale. He’s recovering from a heart attack and four bypasses.

When my husband and I followed the limo to the church, I could see Daddy and Grandaddy in the back of it, side by side…two silver heads, exactly alike.

Grandma is broken but her faith is not. She says, I’m truly glad she isn’t suffering any more but oh, it hurts. It hurts.

She died on Good Friday, Grandma, I tell her. Like Jesus.

Grandma looks at me a long moment, her watery blue eyes gleaming: I can’t belive I haven’t thought of that.

The service begins. On Grandma’s other side, Granddaddy bows his head. Tears are trickling down his cheeks.

This is the only time I’ve ever seen him cry.

*******

Easter morning. I am thirty-seven. My husband and our boys have only been in our new house for a month and I’m still scrambling to get organized. I love the house, not that I wasn’t grateful for parsonages having been provided all these years, it’s just that eventually we will retire and you can’t do that in a parsonage. Plus…I can’t say exactly why, but this place somehow reminds me of my grandparents’ home. The great irony being that they’ll never see it. None of my childhood family will. Granddaddy’s been gone four years. Grandma’s in the nursing home; she’ll never travel again. Daddy died suddenly seven months ago and I’m still trying to process it, especially since everything fell apart with my mother afterward and there will be no repairing the ripping apart of our family…I think about how she took me and my sister to church…how she was the first person to sign up for the bus ministry…I have to remember the good, I must choose to remember the good, for it was there and real and even though a person may be destructive with those wheels already in motion long before she brings you onto the planet, there were always good things.

I cannot dwell on this anymore, I have two children of my own to get ready for church now and Easter is our biggest day…it really won’t do for the preacher’s wife to be late. Again.

*****

Easter morning. Today. Let’s just say my fifties will soon be coming to a close. Depending on when you read this, I will either be headed to church or having returned home. My husband is still preaching. Our oldest is in his fifth year of pastoring a church nearby, close enough that our two granddaughters come over often, including these past couple of days, to play with their Franna. Our daughter-in-law is an extraordinary pastor’s wife and mother as well as an incredible artist. So many gifts. Our youngest is playing piano for today’s worship service and he’ll sing the solo for the choir on “Rise Again” in his beautiful, beautiful voice… his fiancee is deeply compassionate, loving, always smiling. They are happy. Yesterday I wrote of digging the past and mining your memories for the stories that matter…today I write, my heart overflowing with abundance of life, for now, now, now. Today I write of the peace that passes understanding, for with God, the story does not end. The message of Easter that echoes through the ages is not one of death, but of life; not of lost causes, but of new purpose; not of despair, but of overcoming…it is a message of redemption, sacrificial love, forgiving, being set free. I think of those words, rise again, as I drive out of my neighborhood to see a hawk take flight, the morning sun flashing on its white belly, and discovering, that same day, the house finches have, indeed, built a new nest in the front door wreath, despite last year’s tragedy of all five babies dying suddenly. The mother began laying eggs during Holy Week.

Five of them.

The father sang a beautiful song after each egg was laid.

A song of new life, hope, and joy.

I know it so, so well.

The echoes of Easter.

*******

Composed for the 31st and last day of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

—thank you all for being such a loving, supportive community;
please keep writing ❤

Eagles

/ Fran Haley / 10 Comments

I grew up in the city, a child of sidewalks, stoplights, bridges, and clattering trains. I could walk to church, to the 7-Eleven for Slurpees or candy, to Woolco buy the latest hit song on a 45 RPM record, and to all three public schools I attended from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

The memories of nature from my neighborhood, other than the maple tree which dropped its leaves in the front yard every fall, are the gray roly-polies I played with on the concrete steps at the back door, the slugs I salted to watch them dissolve (sorry, slugs), ants, and eastern tent caterpillars with their beautiful rainbow patterning. I caught them put and them into recycled butter tubs with lids, to be disappointed when they turned into such plain moths. Oh, and the random mouse that got in the house to startle my mother, who screamed. And the ditch rat that got into my bedroom… another story for another day, that.

I know there were birds. There had to be birds.

I can’t remember them.

I longed to live in the country, with my grandparents. Even though the mosquitoes, yellow flies, and ticks might eat me alive, I could find tiny gray toads the size of my thumbnail. I would marvel at the dazzling colors of dragonflies, once I got over my terror of them. Hummingbirds zoomed past me for my grandmother’s flowers, never minding my presence, their emerald and ruby feathers gleaming like jewel-fire. Cicadas rattled the earth and my heart with their rhythms. There were deer, rabbits, snakes (alas!), and birds, always birds, chattering and singing incessantly in the dense woods…

The longing never left me, so when my husband and I settled in the countryside, I knew I was home. I rejoiced that our boys would grow up treasuring a closeness to nature…

So I thought.

The oldest always wanted to live in the city (is this always the way? Wishing for the exact opposite of what we have?).

He grew up. He went to the city.

He was miserable.

He came back…got married, became a father…

He texted me a photo recently, with tremendous excitement: Look what I just saw!

A barren field along a deserted country road…

Where stood two bald eagles.

His eyes sparkled when he saw me later: They were huge! So beautiful…

It is better than I ever dreamed, this life, here in the country.

Isn’t it, Son.

*******

Composed for Day 22 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

Nature’s divine voice

/ Fran Haley / 20 Comments

“Nature is the infrastructure of our communities…Nature enriches us economically and culturally and historically, but it also enriches us spiritually. God talks to human beings through many vectors: Through organized religions and the great books of those religions, through the prophets and wise people, and through art and literature and music and poetry, but nowhere with the same detail and texture and grace and joy as through Creation. And when we destroy nature, we impoverish our children. We diminish their capacity—and our own—to sense the Divine, to understand who God is, and to grasp what our own potential is as human beings.” —Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Confession

Before I started writing
in earnest
I didn’t know
how much
I love nature

I should have known
by the way
cicada summersong
stirs sacred memories

I should have known
by the certain slant
of light
on fiery autumn trees
there’s hope within
which never leaves

I should have known
from the brilliant beckoning
of silversharp stars
on a clear winter’s night
or by Venus,
glittering bright
over the ocean
as the sun rises
that the soul
must keep reaching
for what it cannot
grasp

I should have known
that once I start seeking
I will find
just as I discover hawks
perched high above me
every single time
I think to look up

I should have known
by the poignant scent
of fallen pines
and freshcut grass
that newness
returns
after the pain

I should have known
how much humans
have lost
by not living close
to the earth
as we were meant to
(as we did, in ages past)
or how this void
is behind
the longing
of every soul
crying out
for belonging
healing
restoration
and peace

I should have known
all things
are interconnected
and sustained

by the voice
speaking through
nature…

Before I started writing
in earnest
I didn’t know
how much
I love nature

but the important thing
is that I know it now

I will always know it, now

for, like finchsong
at my door,
untold glories
surround me

weaving their way
into my writings
so that I recognize
holy rhythms
of life

spoken into being
into my being

—let me listen
oh, let me listen.

One of last year’s baby bluebirds hanging out by its natal home, on my back deck

*******
Composed for Day 13 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

Rosary beads

/ Fran Haley / 23 Comments

a backwards story

Let them be a memento of the first day I came to see you and of God’s divine grace.

I shall keep them for you until such time that you can understand the story.

I picked them up, brought them home, and washed them. Never mind that we’re not Catholic, your father and grandfather being Baptist preachers.

Considering the significance of my visit, their appearing seemed a rare and holy thing.

A set of rosary beads, right there in the parking lot, with no one else in sight. Perhaps meant for a child, as the beads are plastic, mostly bright blue, with six orange, three green, and a little white crucifix.

When I left the hospital to head home, the rain had ended. The sun sparkled on the wet pavement. My heart danced with the beauty of the day, of the whole world. I stepped gingerly around puddled water shimmering with rainbow swirls, and that’s when I saw it.

Grandparents and grandchildren are a special gift to each other, especially if many years together are granted. Time to love, to live all our own stories, to always be close ’til you’re all grown up and I must go… this is my prayer.

I sat in a chair and your dad placed you in my arms. Joy and awe flooded my very soul…my cup runneth over, and over. I could have held you forever and it wouldn’t have been enough.

And there you were…so little, so perfect…I’d cried when your dad texted the first photos on the previous day. Now, seeing you with my own eyes, I could hear my grandmother’s voice, her narrative: You looked just like a little angel. And that’s exactly how you looked to me, my beautiful Micah. A heavenly being sent straight from the hands of almighty God.

Down came a gentle rainfall, spattering the windshield as I flew to the hospital that morning…once I answered the COVID questions and passed the temperature check upon arriving, I was allowed to go the room.

The end of October is a lovely time of year here in North Carolina, when the sky takes on sapphire hues. I wore a light raincoat because the meterologists predicted sprinkling.

I had to wait until the day after you were born to come see you.

You came during the pandemic. The world struggled with masks and distancing. The hospital limited visitors to two a day…and your dad counted as one.

My grandmother loved to tell me the story of my birth. I shall love telling you yours.

Me holding Micah for the first time.

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Composed for Day 9 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers