Seventy-Nine Years Ago Today

 

BOLT ON POINT, WATCHING A COVEY OF QUAIL THAT WANDERED INTO OUR YARD

       This Sunday morning I am sitting on my back porch watching the birds and squirrels around the feeders.  It is so dry that the watering bowl has attracted six or seven species of birds and a couple of doves.  The big oaks around me aren’t changing colors yet.  Fifty years ago they would have been gold and red by now and a few leaves would be drifting down on the breeze.  The winter in the Ozarks will be fairly mild, I think, because the seasons are changing a little.  Climate change is no big deal; the earth has been doing that for eons.

   

    Just a few days ago we had some quail below the oaks and two days later fifteen young turkeys. There was a fawn born behind the pond this past spring that my daughter happened across. Now it comes through the back yard on occasion. From the tracks around the pond, deer, bobcats, raccoons, foxes, you name it, all water there. That’s why I built it… to provide water for those that need it on this high ridge top, filled with big oaks and hickories and walnuts and a dozen other species of trees.  When I leave this earth I wouldn’t mind a bit if heaven were much like this home and this ridge top overlooking the river valley.  I don’t mind if heaven is like where I live now, far from the towns, well sheltered from the crowds and a throwback scenario to a better life, when technology wasn’t bent on destroying all of us. and a time when folks were a little bit simpler and slower like me.

         I was born about sunrise this morning seventy-nine years ago today in a little farmhouse with board floors and no electricity or running water. This morning I sat there alone thanking God for these seventy nine years, and I never felt so good.  God let me have a great life as an outdoor writer-photographer and naturalist.  I wasn’t smart enough to be anything else. As the years pass, I just get more backwarder!  

       Mentally I still feel like I just turned thirty.  Only my aging back and legs keeps me from taking my camera and rod and reel and going out on the river for a while this evening.  I am patient though, my boat and paddle are waiting and that time is not far ahead as it gets cooler.  Thankfully, though walking very far is harder to do, sitting on my boat seat and paddling is as easy as ever.  About the first of November, at midweek, I will get to be alone on the river, just me and the Great Creator.

       This morning, my wife and daughters are in church, where my parents would be if they were here. They’d be put out with me for staying home. I doubt if I have any other family members who aren’t in church. But I feel as if am in church too, alone on my porch, just thankful and happy.  God is here with me if he is anywhere! 

       I have been to church!  I have heard too many preachers in the last seventy some years… hundreds of them. Many confuse me. When I was a kid, a couple of them came into the pool hall on occasion and tried to answer my questions about God and Jesus.  One of them finally told me, “Son, Sunday school is tomorrer…this mornin’ I came in to play snooker while my ol’ lady shops!”  One of the funniest exchanges took place when I tried to get one of them to tell me why you had to say Amen after you  prayed.  That story is in the book I am about to publish.  It is my bibliography… “The Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid”.

       We had a good talk this morning… ‘me and God’.  I  let him know that I need no gold mansion or streets of gold, should St. Peter see fit to let me in.  He told me that He understood!  I said I would be real happy with woodland trails and clear cool rivers with high bluffs and sycamores and lots of fish.  I am a lot more like Peter the Fisherman than any of them other folks in the Bible.  

       I let him know that I would love to have all my family and friends there with me; with a garden and lots of wildflowers. I would really like a Labrador and an English setter and hundreds of birds, and wild creatures. How could heaven be without them. And though I love duck stroganoff, I said I would be content with wild mallards over decoys just to look at, not to shoot. 

       I’d like to be able to take folks out on nature trips and down the rivers like I use to do. I’d like to have fish fries on occasion and family reunions. I want to help folks better there than I could help folks here ‘cause I think I could do a better job of it.  I said I sure hope that in heaven we can eat things.  How could we not have banana cream pie and chocolate cake and ice cream and peaches and watermelon in heaven? And donuts? I can’t imagine not watching a thunderstorm roll across the valley or not hearing a gentle rain patter against the leaves at night. I reckon a little snow every now and then would be okay too.  Not a blizzard, just something you could track rabbits in.

       Well there you have it for what me and the Good Lord are talking about this morning, on my back porch, watching the birds.  And of course I’ve been thanking him for these past seventy-nine years. Boy did they go by fast!

BACK PORCH ON LIGHTNIN' RIDGE