The cedars

 The Cedars of Cemeteries 

This particular cedar is in the Oaklawn Cemetery in downtown Lake City. I am moved by any old cedar in any old cemetery, especially when, in the long, slow, tenacious course of time, they over grow  their boundaries.

Jumpy

 Jumpy 

Soon after moving to Williston from Kentucky in 1967, my father planted a sweetgum and maple tree between the parsonage and the Methodist church. As a hurdler in 7th grade, I would jump the trees coming and going from church on Noble AV. We moved in 1977, the parsonage and sweet gum are gone but the maple remains. My dad called me Jumpy as a boy, an appropriate nickname.

Wee John

 Wee John

Big Shot was recently asked the origin of Wee John. This was his answer: When Big Shot was Wee, like 3-6 Wee, he had a little plastic friend who really wasn’t plastic but in order for the adults to leave them alone to their designs, little man played along.

And so they were content and little man got little big shot out of more than a little jam or two. Now when it came time for little big Shot to move from Sopchoppy to Monticello with his family, little man was no where to be found. Little big Shot looked all through the house, the yard, the sand pile, even across the street at the river bank. No little man. Little man just didn’t want to move. And so he stayed in Sopchoppy where he remains to this day. Wee John is the figment of Little man, though a poor, plastic figment of a real replica.

This is a drawing Little Big Shot made of little man in case you happen to see him.

Take me home

 Take me home

I said I’d get around to updating the veiled eulogy to my mountain mother from Crumpler, West Virginia, so now she awaits the Greyhound for the journey home, just as we did Summers to see Grandmother and all the Orander family, now all gone on, except David and Donna Lynn.

Edge of

 Edge of Fairie Wood

In the din of shadow deep

Quietly abide lest you awaken

The slumbering fairies sleeping

Lest into their spell you be taken

Casting o’er you so mysteriously

The spell of becoming a  cypress knee.

No telling

 No telling

Johnclarestokes 

You know, there is a place in earshot

Of the roaring, where it seems time forgot

Or at least, you can get there legally

For lately, it seems, every place is privately

owned, reserved for those who seldom

venture along, for they have usually a 

multitude of homes, and we who in cheap

kayaks roam, aren’t welcome, unless we

by some quirk, know them, and usually,

we don’t, or wouldn’t care to.

So I’m not telling

Where the thousand cypress knees

Are dwelling

Lest the call goes out to the realtor

I must own this place

Make haste.

Yellow flies

Yellow fly’s the time 

There were long hours spent on the porch

Tin roof shading from the Florida sun 

The silence interrupted by the wire swatter

From beneath in sand the ants would come

Carrying below the high porch the silent

ones who moments before sucked blood

The itching persisting into the evening

As the moths circled around the bare

yellow bulb swaying to the rocking

Mosquitoes waking for the evening shift

The fly swatter of little use to defend

bare flesh from the incessant assaults 

til we’d have to retreat to the front room

the high tongue and groove ceiling above 

with the long wire white bulb extinguished 

to sleep as the cicadas in sand emerged.

Homewood

 The longer grew our memory of home, the greater the boards, brick and tin took on a perfect mend. The December air in the slits, once as a siren, now but a gentle wind. The November smoke from the chimney, once billowing the black soot, now but a lazy waft upward, the April rain pelting awake upon the leaking tin, now a lullaby in our tender sleep. The front porch the only relief from the July heat, now a siesta in the creaking swing.

4th heaven

4th heaven

Lately the angels were lagging

In their guardian duties

And this displeased the Lord truly

To the 4th heaven His laggards sending

For today a new teacher has arrived

Experienced already in angelic duties

And to boot she’s quite the beauty

As the remedial angels sighed

Now class stand and pledge allegiance 

Hand over heart and wings straight

And thus began the whipping in shape

The new teacher and her host of students

Soon it came time for mid eternity exams

These once lagging guardians beamed

As all passed with hundreds times hundreds

Not a finer angelic teacher was ever found

But the angels were saddened somewhat 

Though now promoted to the fifth heaven

Word was it wasn’t such the blessing

As with this new teacher of 4th heaven Summers.

My mother, Clara Jean Orander Stokes would have been 98 today. She taught 4th grade mostly. 

Here shown in Wilmore Elementary, Kentucky.

Others love

 Others love

Today was one particularly bad pity party, thinking how day upon day, I go to work, and it’s as if you’re not even liked, not even important, no one ever asks, and how are you? Your family? And it rubs upon you, today perhaps more acutely, for all day I thought upon my mother and how totally not she was this way, always thinking of others, their concerns, their hopes, joys, setting hers aside, not even expecting any praise or kind word her way. And so I too tried to lay aside my self absorption and expectation from those incapable, focused in their own worlds, and tried in just a small way, to be like my mother and love others, and not expect any love my way.

Waler house

 The Waler house

Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

I’m sure there is history to the Waler house, beside the men’s bathhouse. Were I a Shaker

and I had to abide by their strict religious ways,

I imagine I’d spend most of my days in the Waler house.

The trumpets sound

 The Trumpets Sound

Today has been overcast and raining. It was kind of like in the Crumpler Mountains of West Virginia, I knew as a boy, the coal dust from the Pocahontas mine giving the fall landscape a coating of fine black, dulling the brilliance. When my Crumpler born mother passed away on this day three years ago, a day short of her 89th birthday, we sang at her funeral in the Williston United Methodist Church, who celebrated 150 years today, “When the roll, is called up yonder”.

Being a teacher her entire career, it was appropriate. It was the only time I visibly cried when we sang it. We never know why and what triggers our crying. We mostly hide it. 

The first line goes, “when the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more.”

Wes Smith, the pastor of the Williston Church of God we are now attending, gave the sermon today from first Peter titled, The end is near. I am biased, for Wes, a year younger than me, was my friend and fellow Methodist at my fathers church when we came to Williston in 1967. I think Wes is one of the finest Pastors I’ve ever heard. But I’m biased. His mother is definitely the best piano player. As we left, the crow atop the steeple seemed to be sounding the same theme. I’ve always been one to take great stock in the animal kingdom, kept mute yet seeing clearly, unlike us, the invisible One, I would like to think. Like Baalam’s donkey. 

At the Ivy House for lunch, we remarked as to the lovely pink flowers in the yard beside the City Hall. I took a photo and google said it was the pink trumpet vine. Walking out in the Williston rain, I could hear a distant song, 

I could hear the Wesley Smith family singing even more clearly than in 1975, The Sounds of His Coming.

Can you hear it? Please attune so you can.