Friday Morning

Sky dark and it's going to rain and the garden waits patiently and the chickens call to be let out and the world seems a very scary place and the boys are coming over and the wind hisses through the new leaves like a spirit snake.

sssssssSSSSsssssss....
It says, and it grows and diminishes, the trees waving their green hands in agitation, their new stem-wrists young and thin and flexible and strong.

A hen calls her rusty cluck, a day's egg already laid in the soft-straw bowl in a wooden crate in the garage. I call her Miss Honey because she's the color of tupelo sweetness. Something happened to her tail feathers but they are growing back and she lives here/doesn't live here. I throw her extra corn when she comes round. How I appreciate that daily egg, how the sight of her cheers me. A gift I did not ask for, perhaps the sort which is sweetest. The hens in the henhouse, the ones who do live here, call back to her. Is this celebration or concern?

I got an e-mail from Jessie. They are in Florence now. She asked if we are recovered from her wedding. This is what I wrote her back:

No. We are not recovered and I never want to recover because your wedding changed us in some way. It brought us a new vision of love and community and caring and joy and beauty. Last night Liz Sparks had us and Lon and Lis over for dinner and it was so perfect to sit on her porch, to be in her house, to talk about your wedding and we can't stop talking about it. How beautiful it all was. How beautiful you two are. We kept going back over it, your wedding, reliving moments and images and dances and people. Your daddy and Lon swung in the hammocks on Liz's porch and birds were singing themselves to sleep in the trees. 

And so it is. 

It seems to me that I keep receiving unasked for and completely undeserved gifts all of the time and perhaps, maybe, one day, I will learn that life is full of those. Perhaps it will settle me in some way. I do not know. But I do know that even as the wind hisses and the leaves jitter like a junkie's hands, even as the world tumbles into chaos over and over again, there is sweetness, there is light behind the clouds, there is the unexpected goodness which comes through, even in the strangest of times, and in Florence there is the David, in the garage there is a warm brown egg, and in the dark sky above there is rain which the trees, the ferns, the flowers, the peas and potatoes wait for because it is life.