Category Archives: Memoir

Courage at Twilight: A Fox in the Dell

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Mom’s and Dad’s retirement home is located near the Dimple Dell natural recreational area, a series of deep sandy ravines and canyons carved by rainwater rivulets and a trickling stream. Trails winds their way through the bottoms, beside the stream.  I have attempted to ride my mountain bike on the trails, but always become mired in deep sand or get bucked by river cobbles.  Still a runner when he retired, Dad enjoyed jogging a six-mile course every day on the river bottom trails.  During one run, Dad saw a gorgeously burnished red fox trotting along the trail in front of him, looking back over her shoulder at him as he ran.  Dad thought to try an experiment.  He stopped jogging.  The fox stopped trotting, and they looked at each other for a few moments.  Dad sat down.  The fox, in turn, sat, and from a distance of about ten feet, Dad began talking to the fox.  “You are such a nice, beautiful fox,” he complemented.  “You have a very bushy tail.”  The fox simply gazed back at Dad as he prattled on.  As Dad stood to resume his trail run, the fox resumed his trot along the trail.  Soon the fox veered sharply off the trail and climbed a hill.  Perhaps the fox’s den is nearby, Dad wondered.  He began thinking about what the fox had available to eat in the Dell, and whether the fox might like some chicken from the grocery store.  After his run, Dad went to Smith’s to buy the chicken.  He selected a raw chicken, but questioned whether the fox might prefer a cooked chicken.  So, he bought both a raw chicken and a cooked rotisserie chicken, took them into the Dell, retraced his steps, and climbed the hill where he had seen the fox climb.  He found the fox’s den, and placed the chickens about 15 feet away, so the fox would not suspect a trap.  Dad returned the next day on another run, and the chickens, of course, were gone.  He knew he could not, and probably should not, provide many chickens to the wild fox, but he hoped his gift had been enjoyed.  He, in turn, had very much enjoyed the gift of his friendly encounter with the wild red fox.

(Above image by Here and now from Pixabay.)

Dimple Dell against the Wasatch Mountains.  (Photo from AllTrails.)

Book Review: Rabbit Lane Memoir

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May be an image of book

My son, Brian Wallace Baker, a recent MFA graduate in creative non-fiction and poetry, wrote this kind post as a gift to me.  I am deeply touched and grateful.  Brian’s post:

As a writer, I think a lot about other writers, how some get big book deals, big prizes, and how even these writers aren’t household names. And it’s rare for a writer, no matter how popular, to be remembered beyond their generation. Thinking about this has made me realize that fame and success have little to do with being a good writer. There are so many good books out there, and more being written and published all the time, and most of them will have relatively small audiences. And that’s okay. I’ve learned that good writing has a lot more to do with changing hearts than it does with seeking fame and fortune.

Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road is one of those good books with a small audience. It has many profound things to say and good stories to tell, which is why my last book review of the year will be about this book.

My relationship to this book is different from most other books because I appear as one of the characters, and I know many of the people and events discussed in the book. Rabbit Lane is my dad’s memoir. It’s about his experience of moving to the small farming town of Erda, Utah, raising his kids there, and what he learned from the community and the landscape. The stories vary widely in subject matter from escaped cattle to encounters with skunks, from a sacred Native American sweat ceremony to giving a duckling CPR. There are also many poems and songs scattered throughout the book.

The main character of the book is not a person at all. It’s a narrow country road called Rabbit Lane, where my dad walked day after day, finding peace, poetry, and insight along the way. Throughout the book, Rabbit Lane changes from a dirt road lined by trees and irrigation water, teeming with muskrats and crayfish, to a poorly paved one-lane road lined with backyards. Despite its transformation, Rabbit Lane is still an important place for our family.

Rabbit Lane is a place of meditation and observation, and my dad’s book is filled with both. His meditations on life have been eye- and heart-opening for me. Here’s an example:

“In the quiet of Rabbit Lane, I often ponder the purpose of life. Has it occurred to me that the purpose of life may be simply to live? Not just to breathe and have a pulse, of course, but to live the best life we can every day, slogging through the sorrow and the suffering in exchange for hope and a greater measure of joy and contentment, seeking to attain our full potential, to find the best that is within us.”

One thing I love about this book is its many descriptions of the natural world I grew up in, such as this one:

“On many an evening I strained to discern the source of a soft, ghostly, reverberating sound moving over the farm fields. But I never found it. Explaining this mystery to Harvey one afternoon, he told me to look high into the sky whenever I heard the sound. There, I would see a small dot, the ventriloquistic snipe. Flying high, the snipe turns to dive and roll at breakneck speeds toward the ground. Wind rushing through its slightly open wings creates the haunting sound. The snipe throws the sound somehow from those heights to hover foggily over the fields.”

(Yes, no matter what you may have experienced or heard about Boy Scout snipe hunts, snipes are very real.)

Toward the end of the book is a passage that has left a deep impression on me:

“Brian, home from his first semester of college, announced happily he was going for a walk. He bounded away with enthusiasm. Weary from Christmas chaos, I nonetheless determined to venture forth. A walk down Rabbit Lane, at night, under the falling snow, is enchanting and not to be missed. Proceeding down Church Road toward Rabbit Lane, I followed Brian’s footprints. At the intersection, I saw that Brian’s tracks turned north onto Rabbit Lane. I felt contented to see that his spirit had chosen the path that I have so often taken. Now my boots followed his.”

I’ll always be following your boots, Dad, but you have taught me how to “venture forth” on my own, how to find beauty. Thank you for the gift of your book and the gift of showing me Rabbit Lane, not just the road but the sacred life that surrounds it. No matter where I go, I hope to walk the way you taught me to walk down Rabbit Lane, gently, respectfully, joyously.

I highly recommend this book. Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road can be purchased here: Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road.

Thank you, Brian.

(Photo by Brian Baker.)

Windmill on the Coast of Portugal

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Windmill on the Coast of Portugal

Whistle and whoosh come from the aged acrylic, old plywood behind, the building white and blue, though the eight arms stretch suspended and still, hung on my wall in a frame, and I remember these thirty years yet.  Clack . . . Clack . . . Clack . . .  round and round turned the granite circle stone, heavier than heavy, lifted once with a wooden windlass crane to the third-floor attic where eight men heaved and pushed and positioned this stone atop another: only the upper stone turned.  And the clacking stick jiggled the chute and the wheat stones drip-dropped into the center and ground and gristed into white farinha powder to mix with water and yeast and salt and oil to ferment and bloat into the steaming aromatic crisp and chew of bread.  The noise of fitting wood cogs and turning and grinding stones heavy as mountains and the incessantly clacking stick, and outside: the sails, four of them, white canvas, catching the Atlantic and whooshing wildly around with insistent hurricane power, and I knew if I stood errantly and a long arm struck, I would be flung clear to Madeira.  And the jars, those terra cotta jars, an angry orchestra of clay shrieking in thirds and fifths and octaves as they led the sails and followed the circling sails.  I did climb the stone stairs inside the round stone walls to watch everything spinning, the cogs and the wheels and the stones and the central beam – even the roof rotated to bring about the sails – with clouds of choking kernel dust – that central beam one foot square pointing a mile toward the sea, the great roiling ocean of Magalhães and Vasco da Gama and Bartolomeu from whose ship sterns the lusty homesick men watched the sails shrinking and waiving interminably, the shrieking jugs weakened to whispers and then gone, the tiny sails waiving in circles to the big caravel sails on the sea.

(Title painting by Erin Baker)

 

Portuguese Windmill

(Image by Horácio Lopes from Pixabay)

Half the Student Body

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Half the Student Body

“If we had known the severity of your handicap, you would not have been admitted.”  That is what the law school averred, in 1960, when he was wheeled into class – speaking intentionally in the passive, because he could not wheel himself, nor could he write or type, turn the pages of his textbooks, raise his hand in class, feed himself, or use the restroom.  “We don’t have the facilities for you.”

Our anger was a fury sparked by profound injustices.
And with that rage we ripped a hole in the status quo.

But having arrived somehow at the school, he kept rolling on.

I call for a revolution that will empower every single human being
to govern his or her life.

Roommates hoisted him to the floor and turned on the shower so he could roll around to bathe.  Women gathered at his door each morning to greet him and push him to campus.  Law students took long notes longhand, holding them up for him to memorize one page at a time.

Disability is an art.  It’s an ingenious way to live.

At the phrase “I need to” Nelson took him to the restroom, lifted him from his chair, lowered his trousers, clasped him from behind to hold him up at the urinal, or set him on the commode, then tidied and dressed him and took him back to class.

I am different, not less.

Sitting at a study table, when he sneezed from a cold, his head flopped over and hit the table with a bang.  He lifted his head just in time for another sneeze and thump.  A clang every time.  One could not very well hold his head all afternoon in anticipation of a sneeze.  The sneeze simply erupted when it wished, with a heavy clonk on hardwood.

I’m already healed.  Just because I can’t walk doesn’t mean I’m not whole.

He graduated from college.  He slogged through law school.  He was their friend, and they were his friends.  They helped him: half the student body.  He ennobled them by inviting them to join him on his journey.

When everyone else says you can’t, determination says, YES YOU CAN.

A student in a wheelchair, whose name I never knew.  He graduated from that law school where they tried to tell him No.  He became an attorney in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C.  And he married a lovely girl.  And he fathered dear children.  And he lived a life full and long.

Alone we can do so little.  Together we can do so much.

Quotations from these Powerful Able-Disabled:
-Judy Heumann
-Justin Dart
-Neil Marcus
-Temple Grandin
-Ed Roberts
-Robert Hensel
-Helen Keller

(Image of Stephen Hawking by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay)

Roger is a municipal attorney, homebody poet and essayist, and amateur naturalist.  Roger is the author of Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road and A Time and A Season.  Rabbit Lane tells the true life story of an obscure farm road and its power to transform the human spirit.  A Time and A Season gathers Roger’s poems from 2015-2020, together with the stories of their births.  The books are available in print and for Kindle at Amazon.  See Rabbit Lane reviewed in Words and Pictures.

Jordan River Cantor

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Jordan River Cantor

Dearest Mother,

Tonight I kayaked on the Jordan hoping to see a beaver, for lately I have noticed bits of beaver sign, like newly-gnawed box elder bark, and willow stems sheered with a single toothy slice. Porter’s Landing offers a rubber launching mat, a picnic table pavilion, and a merciful portable toilet: I put in there.  I paddled hard upstream, tense and anxious for wanting to arrive, to see a beaver.  But I regrouped and reminded: when I want to see wildlife, I must release my need to see wildlife.  One cannot ever coerce an encounter: one must allow to happen whatever wishes to happen.  Soon I settled into a smooth rhythmic stride.

Garish orange-black orioles chittered at me from the treetops.  Goldfinch on an eye-level branch watched me paddle by.  Great blue heron glided slowly in, dangling long gangly landing gear.  Cormorant, oil-black, rounded a bend low over the river then veered sharply away.  Kingfisher kept a hundred feet upstream, scolding with each irritated launch.  Canada Goose parents with six fuzzy new goslings paddled single file, an adult fore and aft.  Wild iris sprouted in clumps near the bank boasting delicate butter-cream flowers.  The river was calm and beautiful and slack and dark as the sun began to sink.

One hour upstream would see me back just before dark.  And at that one-hour mark a willow switch swam slowly against the current and stopped at a grass-hidden bank.  I glided slowly by, and there sat a beaver, upright on her haunches in the shallows munching.  A beaver!  Alive and real and close and wondrous – two famous enormous buck teeth, long tawny whiskers, tiny black-bead eyes, little round ears, rust-red fingers holding the branch just like I would hold a branch.  She chewed quickly and loudly and contentedly, completely unaware of my ogling.  But when she heard me she straightened and turned slowly and dove, nonchalant, and as she dove she raised her tail lazily and slapped the water with a cross crack.

My encounter with the beaver felt beautiful and personal and honorific and close.  I will take Hannah tomorrow.  We will ride our bicycles on the riverside trail, and I will show her where I saw the beaver.  We will sit on the trail above the bank and munch our sandwiches and whisper to each other until she comes.

I hope to see you soon.  Love always,

Me

(Image above by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay.  Images below by author.)

 

Tattoo

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Tattoo

Needles and knives. Maori face chisels. Dark ink and scars. Tattoo – from tatu of Tahiti, tatau of Samoa, Tongan tatatau – from the tapping tools of tattoo. Symbols of virtue and strength worn by warriors and kings, mariners and queens. Tattoo from before prehistory. Tattoo for souls lost, and found. Four inked stories in swirls and silks and symbols, the what and why of four lives, seeking and finding, declaring this is me. Their lost-and-won battles, their peoples, their idyls – in tattoo. These four I know and admire. These four I love. My canvass is empty: I wear my scars inside. These four exhibit their beautiful selves in tattoo. Ways to be.

_______________

Paul and His Victory over the God of Death

I had wanted a tattoo for years, but couldn’t decide on what I wouldn’t regret. We weren’t happy together, and when we separated, I should have been happy alone – I was free – but the darkness closed in and accused, “You’re a failure. Failure. You don’t matter. You should just kill yourself.” Why is suicide always on the table? I don’t want to die. I drove down dark streets fighting with the voice that wanted me to end it all. And then, there was the parlor, and he said he had a cancellation so he had time for me, and I knew, finally, suddenly, what it was to be. I want these words and I wrote them on a paper scrap, and he said, Sure, but we’re going to make it art, not just words, ok? Okay. I might have given in, given up, but everything fell into place and the words came, the words that saved my life, and today I wear these strong words: What do we say to the God of Death? Not today! I don’t know where they came from, they just came, like electricity, like a bright light, like instantaneous knowledge: a revelation. And I felt whole. And I knew I mattered.

_______________

Todd the Bear

Dude, I am the bear. I always walked through life’s pine-tree wilderness alone, not needing anyone – or so I thought – and all the time I felt sad and worthless and flawed and needing others desperately, and clawing my way through the thorny crushing wild. I am still that bear, but I no longer walk alone. My loved ones: they are the birds overhead always. I know I am not alone. I know I can make it. But I am still the bear, and I have to make my own way through this dense forest. The paw prints on the path are mine – no one makes them for me – and the directions I travel are mine. The choice is always mine. The path unfolds before me even as I choose it.

_______________

Sione’s Island Home

Io. This tattoo is my island, and my family and my clan. My family name means We who carry Kings on our Boats on the Sea. These sea turtles are symbols of my island. These are my people, who fish and sail the sea and climb the coconut palm barefoot and grind the meat and press the milk and drink the ground kava and remember the sacrifice and sadness where the tree first grew. These patterns here, we put them on the big tapa cloth with black hibiscus dye and red hibiscus dye. I am in my people and my people are in me. Io. Malo.

_______________

Liddy, Her Angels Entwined

I wore a tiny silver cross, wore it always in faith and in supplication for those I loved, for those I wanted to see protected and blessed, a silver cross on a silver chain around my neck always. One day I sent it to you, my silver cross, to you, because I just knew you needed something special from me, that the tiny silver cross would be your blessing now. And I wear these angels, gently entwined, entwined in the idyl of love, enwrapped in the gift of each other. I wear these angels like I wore the cross, to believe down deep, to cherish, to remember that love is the key, the only key, to that door in the sky. These angels I wear for you – and for everyone – and for me.

Angels Sing

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Angels Sing

Prayer was opaque.  Holy writ just words.  I did not know where God was.  We lifted things from the cardboard box, cupping them like fragile hatchling chicks: ukulele – senior yearbook – prom  photo – drawings and doodlings – Church worthiness card – Eagle Scout medal – employee-of-the-month certificate – Godzilla action figure – hoodies and pajamas, smelling of him, a good clean smell.  We planted a linden tree, tall and straight, ringed with daffodils.  He didn’t know who he was.  He didn’t have any sharp edges.  Not.  One.  The only thing I hated about him was that he hated himself.  I have to wonder if one more text, one more call, one more conversation or smile or hug might have tipped the scales.  You slipped a letter in before the casket closed and asked him to remember playing Legos in Grandma’s basement and having play fights with Godzilla.  A small thing, you said.  I am numb and sick and angry and sick and numb.  A man told me once, I am going to walk through that door, and when I do, the darkness will not come through with me.  And the man walked through the door, and the darkness had to stay behind.  Fight to choose light over darkness.  Always.  But our boy was not that strong, yet.  A finger twitched.  A demon slug.  In the end, all we can do to make a difference in this world is to love.  In your quiet times, you will feel a sweetness in your heart, a soft presence, and you will know it is him.  And then, that Church conference on YouTube with the whole world watching during Covid-19 and the audience stayed home to watch and the tabernacle choir stayed home to watch, but recorded choirs sang from conferences past: and there he was, on the back row by the big organ pipes in his black suit, singing and singing and alive!  Our angel alive and singing.

__________________________

This piece is a word collage gathering the expressions and feelings and images of many family members surrounding our beloved Korey following his death by suicide.  We love him, and feel him with us still, and always.

One Night in Maine

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One Night in Maine

Don’t snap it.
Sweep a smooth long figure 8 and gently lay down the leader.
Your mayfly will hover then rest on the water, the last of the length to touch.
If you snap, you will break your knot and lose your fly.
Imagine 600 feet per second.
That’s it. That’s better.

Lakeside grass is smashed here where bear sat munching meager blueberries in morning’s mist.
You may pick a few for tomorrow’s pancakes, but leave the rest for our friend.

The lake glows burning amber with the sun behind the pines, our water glowing and still, and mayflies dance and bob, and aquatic creatures leap and slap and leap and slap.

A silhouetted loon swims low in a patch of smoldering amber and sings the saddest haunting song laced with hues of joy and reconciliation.

(Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay.)

 

Little Growler

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Little Growler

A lion sits on my bed, a little lion, named Little Growler.  He clambers onto my pillow each morning after I make the bed.  Hello Little Growler, I say.  He guards the small house all day.  And he shuffles off to his secondary perch when I draw back the blankets at night.  He does not demand anything of me.  He does not growl or bark or mewl or drool.  He does not whine or glare or fume.  Little Growler came to stay when I moved away.  She brought him with her one day and introduced us.  She knew I was alone now.  She was 9.

When she turned 10, Olaf skated home with us from Disney on Ice.  He joins Little Growler with a grin that refuses to dim.  Pooh Bear with his round rumbly tumbly completes the trio, wandering in from California when the girl was not quite 2 and we met a giant Pooh and a giant Tigger and they happily squeezed in with us in a photo of the family: together.

I wave to the threesome at night – company in the dark is comforting – and manage to smile and say Good night little friends and remember Hannah at 9 and 10 and 2 and know we have had some happy times and I am not irreparable and I am very much alive and moving into something mysterious and beautiful and that Little Growler will be perched on my pillow when I come home at night.

They Fell from the Sky

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They Fell from the Sky

Hundreds of them.  Eared Grebes.  The birds precipitated from inside crystalline clouds where the sunlight flashed in an infinity of ice atoms swirling and refracting in a frozen explosion of brilliance, as if the sun raged coldly right there inside the clouds.  The birds became utterly hopelessly disoriented in the icy intensity, blind, not knowing up from down.  Hundreds of grebes dropped from the mists to bounce into buildings, cars, trees, yards, and parking lots.  And there she stood, unmoving, in my parking space, her olive-brown feet stuck frozen to the ice.  My office key made a crude chisel for chopping around her toes – they bled and flaked skin already.  I wrapped her in my coat and sat her in a box by my desk, with cracker crumbs and a bowl of water.

The children begged to open the box and see what was scratching inside, and exhaled exclamations of wonder when they saw.  What IS it?  She’s an Eared Grebe.  Look at her pointy black beak, her long flaring golden feathers that look like ears, and her crimson eyes.  Do you know what you call a group of grebes?  A Water Dance!  Can’t you just picture the family flapping and paddling and splashing their delighted dance on the lake?

What are we going to do with her?  Can we fill the bath tub?  Our grebe paddled around with obvious enthusiasm.  What are we going to feed her?  How about fish!  Tub-side with a bag of goldfish, the children clamored for the privilege of feeding their bird.  Our compromise: eight hands held the bloated bag and poured.  She darted after the fish in a flash of black and gold and red, a little paddling package of magnificence.  Look at her feet – no webbing.  Look at how her toes unhinge with little retractable paddles.  Wow! came in whispers.

That needling question of what to do with the bird in the bathtub?  We would try a nearby pond, and hope for the best.  The children watched her swim away and they looked sad and happy and I sensed how singular a blessing to have welcomed that bit of living feathered grace into our human home, to release her willfully, to be moved by her wildness and beauty.  And I hoped a small sliver of that exquisiteness would stay behind in memories of hinged toes and golden ears and red red eyes, and of creatures that dance on the water.

(Image by David Mark from Pixabay.) 

Roger is the author of Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road and A Time and A Season.

 

 

Our, Angel Gabriel

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Our, Angel Gabriel

It was an unseasonably warm winter afternoon when Angel Gabriel came to visit.  I was baking bread for his great-grandparents who sat thin-jacketed watching him lead my angel sister toward the enormous long-needled Austrian pine – she carried a five-gallon bucket that could have carried him – where he hunted his favorite treasure: Continue reading →

The Wrong Shade of Blue

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The Wrong Shade of Blue

On my desk stands an assortment of cheap pens, conference swag stamped with the names of cities and malls, colleges and garbage haulers, hospitals and law firms, architects and engineers and janitors.  Some are fat and uncomfortable to grip, like writing with a broomstick.  Some scratch the paper with stiff unrolling ball points.  My favorite boasts a three-inch ruler, a level, and a screwdriver bit in the top: the engineer.  The pens rise from a rough clay jar we turned so awkwardly on a wheel when we were together and laughing and making a memory – Continue reading →

Dragon Patrol

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Dragon Patrol

This was his modus operandi:

arriving at a mountain lake and settling the family with picnic baskets and chairs and tackle boxes and poles, our father walked the perimeter, heading off on a trail if there was a trail, through bushes and over-and-around tree trunks if there wasn’t, to scout the best fishing and to gather perspective of lake and forest and meadow and bog and picnicking family from every vantage point to find what he could find.  He looked small on the opposite shore Continue reading →

Just Like That

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Just Like That

Not one prosthetic leg, but two—two metal legs where shins bones had been, fibula-flanked tibia, and metal feet filling running shoes laced tight and carrying bone and muscle and steel around the gym.  I did not pity him, but I did pity him—I couldn’t help feeling sorry that something violent had taken his legs, his shins, his ankles, his feet.  It could have been an improvised explosive device disguised as a cardboard box along the side of an Iraqi highway.  It could have been a land mine in Afghanistan.  It could have been a pickup truck rolling and rolling cab-crushing rolling down an embankment into cattails and reeds.  My curiosity couldn’t help but wonder.  He moved down the line of upper-body machines, hip flexors lifting metal in a slightly mechanical gait.  Men—guys—simply do not speak to other men at the gym, except for the group that ripple and strut and those that come as friends and spotters, for fear perhaps of misunderstanding or offense, or to project a cool stoic toughness, or to avoid the embarrassment of slack-muscled bald-headed types like me intruding on their pounding blue-tooth buds.  I did finally figure out a way to be friendly without being weird, playing to vanity by asking for tips for this muscle or that, and usually they were friendly, except for one hulk who sneered It’s all in the genes… which I guess meant I owned unfortunate DNA.  But asking the man with carbon-metal legs for tips would be an obvious ruse for selfishly satisfying a shallow curiosity.

Grandpa Charles had worked in the vast shunting yards of the old Rio Grande, getting cars where they needed to be, cleaning, inspecting, greasing, working levers and switches and leaping over couplings and tight-rope-walking tracks and a general hopping about, with frequent reminders that steel is unforgiving, until that day an inattentive engineer lurched a car and crush-killed Grandpa Charles.  Jesse lived alone for long decades after.  And the grandkids never knew Grandpa.

I walked up to him anyway, taboo and all, because I refused to be afraid of being friendly, and I said Hi and told him I think it’s awesome you are here living your life and that I was not asking him what happened, but I’m sure you suffered terribly and I’m sure it took courage to walk again and live again and choose to be strong and fit and social and I admire and respect your strength in adversity and he was nice and I felt happy and relieved and he told me he had been working in the railyard at an industrial depot that used to be an Army depot when he met a spiteful unforgiving train that lurched at him and his legs were gone just like that but he didn’t die and he decided to live again and I told him I would try to do the same when life got hard for me, and he said Nice to meet you, too.

________________________

(Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay )

________________________

Roger is a municipal attorney, homebody poet and essayist, and amateur naturalist.  Roger is the author of Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road and A Time and A Season.  Rabbit Lane tells the true life story of an obscure farm road and its power to transform the human spirit.  A Time and A Season gathers Roger’s poems from 2015-2020, together with the stories of their births.  The books are available in print and for Kindle at Amazon.  See Rabbit Lane reviewed in Words and Pictures.

Teasing Daddy’s Ear

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Teasing Daddy’s Ear

I have been watching a man at church, sitting in his cushioned pew.  His child sits belted in a wheelchair because she cannot use her legs at all and would flop to the floor if unrestrained.  She is motion, her arms and hands fluttering around and her head wagging and her tight long ponytail swishing violently as if warding off some invisible and pestering thing. Continue reading →

Life and Death (A Matter of)

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Life and Death (A Matter of)

Life was about to begin for me when on a TWA jet I poked tentatively at the soft walls of the tight round room of my mother’s womb.  And after quick-passing days she deu à luz (gave the light) to me.  Fifty years later life ended.  Books describe divorce as a kind of death, for its permanence and its depth of loss and grief, and perhaps Continue reading →

Whence Come These Lullabies

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Whence Come these Lullabies

I once composed lullabies.

I suppose they began when my three-month-old baby, my first child, spiked a 103◦ fever, and I was frightened and he was sick and miserable and frightened.  And I cradled him and rocked him for hours in my aching arms gently and rhythmically as I breathed and whispered unconnected assuring words that began to connect and to coalesce with the rocking rhythm and began to hiss forth with sympathy and hope and desperation: Continue reading →

Merlins and Holy Ground

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Merlins and Holy Ground

Dark Trail earned its name for the tree canopy that shades and darkens its travelers.  Gambel oaks.  Mountain maples.  Box Elders.  Orange lichen clothes their trunks as they arc over the path.  I ride a round-trip seven.  The higher I go, the prettier the canyon, campsites yielding to firs and aspen groves and snow pockets still in June.  On Independence Day I launched from a mogul Continue reading →

Directions

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Directions

These rusting tracks still rumble with the rolling weight of history, of capitalism’s commerce, of hobos leaving home leaving family to find money because they had none and would find none neither though hunger compelled them to try, of kine and swine heading to the slaughterhouses to spill their blood and feed a nation, of starry-eyed boys and beaten-down men who knew there was a better life out there somewhere, at the wherever end of the tracks.  With an ear to the cold steel, I can hear the scrape of the coal shovel Continue reading →

Brothers

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Brothers

Cries of “Marco” and “Polo” skip across the surface of the years and I am right back there in my neighbor’s pool swimming for my existence.  He didn’t mind being IT, squeezing his eyes and shouting “Marco” and charging at the splashing sounds of “Polo” we made.  The game was fun, somewhat, and frightening, somewhat, especially when he was IT and I knew I’d get caught and dunked if not drowned.  “Sharks and Minnows” is the same game but this title more truthfully connotes the terror of being a minnow when he was the shark.  Putting fun and anxiety on the scale, I’m afraid anxiety won most times, weighing more heavily on my mind, making the game one I avoided, and when avoidance was socially impossible, sometimes hiding in the corner and whispering “polo.”  I liked being Marco not much better, fearing that the moment I closed my eyes the only thing I would catch was the concrete wall with my teeth, which happily never happened.  I do not play “Marco Polo” with my children.  I much prefer swimming with my eyes open and being neither a shark nor a minnow, but rather a friendly popular whale.  We play “Barnacle” where the little ones cling to my whaleness and I try to throw them off.  Or “Launch” where I throw the children high over my head (having studied our distance from the concrete wall).  When my children grew too old and heavy for me to throw, their younger cousins took their turn, clinging to their old bald waterlogged uncle with shouts and giggles that skip across the surface of the years, and my brother is two again, two to my eighteen, two to my leaving for a university two thousand miles away, before emails, before cell phones, before computers, and how is it even possible to know someone, a family member, your only brother, when he is only two when you’ve grown up and gone.

Now I am 56 and he is 40, my children are mostly grown and gone, and his are still young and joyfully exuberant, and one day he sends me an invitation to join Marco Polo, a video sharing app, and I do, and he starts sending me video messages and I start sending him video messages and soon we are “talking” every week, after a dearth of decades, giving updates about work and children and holidays and moves and home decor and books and thoughts about books and scripture and history and God—the conversation always comes back to God, who is there in our lives, from the beginning of our births to common parents, through our sponging-up childhood and our sluffing-off piecing-together adolescence and our first stumbling attempts at adulthood when stupidity counts but you can still course correct, to our first bumbling efforts at marriage when course correction is more important and more difficult and when the stakes are so dazzlingly high.  I ask him, how can this be that we are talking when I left when you were two and you are now forty and we are talking, we are expressing our hesitant thoughts that normally ramble around only in our own brains, hoping that we each understand the other and appreciate the other’s thoughts and respects the other even and is overjoyed to be an unexpected source of intellectual stimulation—that is what I ask him.  And he starts by pointing out, we never really know someone, we never really have access to them, really; we can live with someone for many years and they will say something that astonishes us or they will misunderstand us in a fundamental way; and while we may have access to the same sights and sounds we never really have access to their minds and thoughts; and how our most common and frequent correspondent is ourself, in our mind’s ruminations, and how these self-conversations often can merge for people of faith, can coalesce into prayer, where we have a new thought or we express gratitude or we ask “What’s that all about?”  And he says, it makes sense to me, for we were born and raised and spent years and decades in the same house with the same parents who struggled to work and provide and teach and mold and prepare us, and the same siblings we loved and lost and now love again, and we share the same DNA, literally the same double-helixed four-lettered molecules in our cells—the same history, the same biology, the same environment—we are brothers, built on a common foundation, and will share a common bond, forever.  I realize how smart and how wise and how right he is, and that thought begins to skip and run and somersault around and to make sense to me, not just the 1+1=2 kind of sense but the meaning of life kind of sense, the kind that seeks to know the human soul, the kind that labors to cultivate goodness and compassion within, the kind that distills into that quantum of existence called Truth.  And then we noticed that the thoughts we recorded and sent by Marco Polo are in common to the other’s thoughts, and these thoughts grow and dance and evanesce into shared minds, for an instant or two, now and then, even though we have never spoken about them to each other before.  And though we will never really know each other or understand each other, and perhaps not even ourselves, and though we will always be in our own worlds, yet we are brothers, and always will be, and share more than we know, more than we thought likely, or possible.

___________________

Roger is a municipal attorney, homebody poet and essayist, and amateur naturalist.  Roger is the author of Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road and A Time and A Season.  Rabbit Lane tells the true life story of an obscure farm road and its power to transform the human spirit.  A Time and A Season gathers Roger’s poems from 2015-2020, together with the stories of their births.  The books are available in print and for Kindle at Amazon.  See Rabbit Lane reviewed in Words and Pictures.

Mr. Whitlock’s Physics Class

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Mr. Whitlock’s Physics Class

New Jersey.  East Brunswick.  High school physics class, with Mr. Whitlock.  (Mr. Whitlock was the band teacher, not the physics teacher, but they were both 50ish and ancient and pudgy (like I am now), and they were both nice to me, and I can’t remember my physics teacher’s name, though I wish I could because he liked physics and he liked us.  But I cannot recall his name, and his picture is not in my high school yearbooks: he must repeatedly have dodged faculty picture day.  So I will just call him Mr. Whitlock for now.)  I was a high school senior proudly registered for physics class.  The olive chalk board was full of Mr. Whitlock’s arrows on arcs and sine-cosine frequencies and equations with X and Y and Z and other wondrous letters and symbols with hidden meanings.  I was enthralled.  While the class title was merely Physics, to me the exciting subtitle was Relativity, Cosmology, Forces, Theories of Everything, and other Cool Space Science Stuff.  A willing sponge, I was eager to soak it all in.  That same year Cosmos erupted into my existence, by Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer and cosmologist with the deep nasal “billions and billions.”  I believed everything he said because it was the science and the truth of the universe.  That is what physics class was all about, right?  But while I adored and worshiped the ideas, I choked on the math—why is it always the math?—and I tripped over the translations of the pretty arrow-arcs into unintelligible long lettered mathematical formulae.  And I came quickly to understand that I did not understand and might never understand the mathematics of physics, despite the fact that I received an “A” in Trigonometry class the year before because I had memorized the equations and aced the tests and then forgot everything, the day after finals, because I had never understood the mystifying logical language of mathematics.

The inexorable dreadful day came when I carried home my report card, folded neatly in a 6×9 manila envelope, and we formed a line at the dinner table where Dad sat at the head before dinner, and we handed him our report cards, one at a time, me the oldest and me the last, and oh how slowly he opened the envelope and drew out my first-quarter report card and unfolded it and slowly and dreadfully scanned the straight As, with the C at the bottom, my first C in history, the C in physics, my favorite and impossible class, and he looked up and said simply, “Is this going to continue?”  But as I stood sickened and sweating, my insecure scared self supplied this translation: This is the best you can do?  I thought you were smarter than that.  I expect more of you.  A C, not being an A, might as well be an F.  F-F-F.  Failure.  You had better do better, son.  Dad meant none of that, of course, though he was and is the best smartest strongest man I knew and know, though his question simply revealed his own exhausted mind as lawyer clergyman handyman father-of-six, though my report card C was simply a small temporary bare blip of a fact, a diminutive letter written in a tiny box in a narrow column of my life, and meant nothing at all whatsoever about me and my value and worth and intelligence and my sense of wonder for the scientific world.  Dad’s question was simply a worry for his son and a hope for his son and an offer to help his son if he could.  I see that.

Please do not ask me why I majored in physics in college.  Please don’t.  Though if you do I will answer simply that I love cosmology and relativity and theories of everything and other cool sciencey spacey stuff.  I just could not do the math.

(Painting “Galaxy” by Roger, though I’m hesitant to claim it.)

Roger Evans Baker is a municipal attorney, homebody poet and essayist, and amateur naturalist.  Roger is the author of Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road and A Time and A Season.  Rabbit Lane tells the true life story of an obscure farm road and its power to transform the human spirit.  A Time and A Season gathers Roger’s poems from 2015-2020, together with the stories of their births.  The books are available in print and for Kindle at Amazon.  See Rabbit Lane reviewed in Words and Pictures.

 

Old Man Walking

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Old Man Walking

We drove to the park.  So did he.   Or perhaps someone drove him—that is more likely, perhaps.  We drove to the Loops at Lovers Lane Park.  Three of us, the youngest and fittest, were there to walk and jog the loose lime-finds path.  Me, the oldest and least fit and least interested in being fit, was there to walk slowly, so I could see the sassafras leaves and the parasitic threads of poison ivy vines sucking on the sassafras and maple and beech and tulip polar trunks.  I wished it were spring so I could gaze upward Continue reading →

Curtains and Veils

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Curtains and Veils

Only a cloth curtain separated the little boy’s anticipation of surgery from my own.  But he was only two and didn’t know what was coming and had two kind parents who spoke in cheerful optimistic soft voices and kind nurses and kind doctors who smiled and were soft and kind.

I am always very careful to say nothing when awaking Continue reading →

7

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7

I have seven children: 7.  They are mine.  Or rather, they are my progeny.  I do not possess them or control them, and would not if I could.  I have 7 children, and they have me, for better or for worse, for they cannot ever claim another father or even another dad.  I am what they got and what they get.  And mostly they are okay with that.  My 7 children each possess a great soul.  They care about this world and its life and beauty and stories and its living creatures all.  They care about the human family and its poverty and illiteracy and violence and illness and squalor.  They study hard and they work hard.  They are kind and generous and patient, and long-suffering.  They are fun and funny and adventurous and smart.  They call me Pops and Papa and Pappy and Dadda and sometimes even Father. Continue reading →

A Tree to Remember

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A Tree to Remember

At the time, I felt proud and childlike and utterly cheerful to plug in the new two-foot-tall artificial Christmas tree with multi-colored lights pre-strung—just slide it out of the box and plug it in—and skirted with a checkered flannel pillowcase hiding three plastic feet.  I hung fragile little ornaments I keep in an egg carton.  This lighted loaded twig brightened my living room, a quiet understated new friend demanding nothing of me, content to glow and keep me company.  Continue reading →

Resistance

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Resistance

That was the morning I awoke late and feeling groggy and foggy and depressed and sluggish, as in, like a slug.  And I had been feeling so well.  I will never take melatonin again at one o’clock in the morning, or for that matter at any other time of the day or night again ever.  Which I also said the last time this happened.  The tablets I have flung in the trash, and the bottle tossed into the recycling box for the next time I visit my parents, who have a giant green plastic recycling can the city empties Monday mornings.  Saturday is a good day to do the laundry, I shrugged,

Continue reading →

A Time and A Season

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My Christmas gift to family and friends this year is this book of poems, A Time and A Season.  The poems span the last five years of my life’s journey, but reach back over forty years of emotional memory.  Each poem is introduced by the story of its birth.  Poetry allows me to explore and express the intimate in a unique word art.  I consider these poems gifts from a larger Source to me.  Not dictated, however, they required pleasant effort, as do all meaningful gifts.  Sharing these poems with you gives me hope and joy.

*  *  *

Roger Evans Baker is a municipal attorney, homebody poet and essayist, and amateur naturalist.  Roger is the author of Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road and A Time and A Season.  Rabbit Lane tells the true life story of an obscure farm road and its power to transform the human spirit.  A Time and A Season compiles Roger’s poems from 2015-2020, together with the stories of their births.  The books are available in print and for Kindle at Amazon.  See Rabbit Lane reviewed in Words and Pictures.

Cards of Leaves and Petals

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Cards of Leaves and Petals

I buy birthday cards at the dollar store: 6 for a dollar.  If I’m lucky I find pack of 8 for one dollar.  And I buy about ten packs which will last maybe a year.  The cards don’t have HAPPY BIRTHDAY!! or anything else printed on them.  Which doesn’t bother me because I can write HAPPY BIRTHDAY!! just well, or even better because I am practicing my handwriting.  I have got the cursive G down and the S as well, but H has me harrumphing.  The fronts of the cards Continue reading →

Merry Christmas, Sunshine!

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Amy helped decorate the family Christmas tree: with lights, ornaments, and…a lizard. Sunshine’s pretty color fits right in. Sunshine is such a good friend to Amy, and Amy to sunshine. Everyone needs good, loyal, supportive friends. As 2020 winds down, we can find someone to be a friend to, someone who needs our friendship, our kindness, even our love. We can do it. We should do it. Try.

Prayers of the Weak and Powerful

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Prayers of the Weak and Powerful

Our Father who art in heaven.  Since I was about 12 years old, or maybe nine, or four, my prayer preamble has been “Dear Heavenly Father….”  But I may in my lifetime have spent more time wondering about prayer than praying, though I am beginning to wonder if there is much of a difference.  Mostly I ask whisperingly What is going on here? or sometimes utter an exasperated What in Heaven’s name is going on here? or on occasion send a belching What the hell is this?  I kneel bed-side or sofa-side, like I am supposed to, though periodically on only one knee because it is more comfortable and because sometimes kneeling on both knees just takes too much out of me and I just cannot do it, and I bow my head, like I am supposed to, to show respect for deity and all that.  And I say, Dear Heavenly Father . . . What is this all about?  Continue reading →

Consecration Cooking

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Consecration Cooking

I cooked for hours.  Even though just yesterday I had roasted the annual turkey, yet today I had cooked for hours, for my children, who would arrive at 6 o’clock for dinner with dad.  Tó Brandileone crooned in the other room as I kneaded five parts butter to four parts flour, simmered sliced leeks in butter and their own juices for a long time until totally tender, whisked eggs and cream, rolled out the cold dough and baked the shells in 10-inch springform pans—they would be enormous quiches, Continue reading →

Introduction to Rabbit Lane: Reflective Essays

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My son Brian is a professional writer, with a Masters of Fine Arts degree in creative nonfiction.  He is also an excellent writer.  He introduced me to the essays of Brian Doyle, through the book One Long River of Song, essays that touch the heart in a searing unsentimental way, that provoke unexpected guffaws, that teach and humor and inspire.  I suddenly realized there existed another kind of writing filling the space between the super-condensed sounds of poetry and the loose narrative of memoir: essays that some, including me, call “reflections.”  Such reflections are what will inhabit this page, this space in cyberspace.  I am still rummaging around for my own style, but these essays reflect no one else but me.  They are longer than poems, but shorter than chapters, and move along quickly.  I hope they beget hope, that what inspired me will inspire you.  Ultimately, I just hope you like them.

They Neither Sow Nor Reap

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In one short cold day the stout gusts denuded my parents’ pear trees.  The leaves were so vibrantly colorful, and seemed alive.  They swirled in little twisters as Dad and I worked to rake them up before the snow fell.  I hated to think of these leaves as just dead things sluffed off in season like flakes of dry skin.  So I didn’t.  I thought of them as beautiful and alive and holy,  like the New Testament lilies and sparrows.  And I thought they deserved a poem.

They Neither Sow Nor Reap

south winds whip and tear
at the joyful tree ornaments
all day until they twirl
and scud on the grass,
pile in corners
of color, multitudinous
vibrant reds, some greens
and yellows at the edges,
all painted uniquely
radiant and beautiful,
these trillions of leaves,
beyond sluffed scaly skin, but
the trees’ living breath,
engines of energy,
carbon sinks,
fall’s wonder-inspirers,
plucked and fallen
like lily petals
and sparrow feathers,
like the hairs of my head

We Swam the Mile Swim

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I was 13 in the summer of 1977.  I had failed the 100-yard swim at scout camp the year before.  Now I was going for the mile swim.  Mist hung heavy on Lake Seneca in the early morning.  My dad lowered himself into the water with a cold shudder and swam out into the lake, while Fritz rowed alongside, with me a passenger.  Dad swam and swam and swam.  Fritz finally said he had swum a mile.  We hauled Dad in, and I jumped out of the rowboat for the long swim back.  The sidestroke was my savior as I swam slowly back to Camp Liahona.  As lake finally gave way to shore and I stood on firm ground, both calves cramped, and I fell to the ground.  Two men lifted me up and put my arms around their shoulders, congratulating me on my accomplishment.  I was proud to sew our seahorse patches on my merit badge sash.  We had done it.  What’s more, we had accidentally swum two miles each, Fritz having rowed us to the wrong landmark!  But we were proud and happy to have done it, and to have done it together.

We Swam the Mile Swim

You know that
patch on the back
of my old olive sash:
white with red
seahorse? I worked
for that patch: I swam
2 miles for 1 patch
2 miles
for the 1-mile swim

because the rower pulled to
the wrong landmark. Of course
I didn’t know
until the long swim ended
and two men shouldered
my dead arms after
both calves imploded
and the mile-swim boss
giggled Why
did you swim so
far? I knew all
along I could do it
no matter how far
because my dad had swum
out to that far landmark
and I had only to
sidestroke slowly
back while he watched
poised
over the gunwale
on Lake Seneca: still
steaming morning’s mist.

Image by TheOtherKev from Pixabay

Lily Pond in Summer Drouth

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Do you ever feel dried out and empty, with no zest for life?  I know I do.  I am thinking that feeling is a common human experience.  The happy parts of life are there but seem just out of reach.  The heat of guilt and the sun of duty sap our strength, along with many other troublesome things.  But I also believe that if we work for it and wait for it, relief comes to us, in the form of a smile, a kind word, a personal achievement, and many other ennobling things.  In this poem I used a dried-out lake bed as a metaphor for the hard times in life, trusting that hope hangs just around the bend of tomorrow.

Lily Pond in Summer Drouth

The lily pond has
completely dried out, birds
have picked the flesh off white-boned fish, old
slimy greenery mats into dark
paper that flakes and flies
away like cindered news:

the sun has sucked all moisture from the muck:

the bowled bed lies cracked and ravined
in a million baked-mud islands:
the definition of a desiccation:

I recall:
red sliders scooting off their sun-logs, fiery
newts crawling with wet leafy fragility,
butter-cream lilies crowning: lotuses
bursting with wisdom and beauty . . .

but the spring will not flow:
the pond has dried and died:
and there is nothing for it
but to settle in

until tomorrow’s heaviness sheds
abundance.

 

Roger is the author of Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road.  The book tells the true life story of an obscure farm road and its power to transform the human heart.  The book is available in print and for Kindle at Amazon.  See Rabbit Lane reviewed in Words and Pictures.

Above image by Carabo Spain from Pixabay.

On the Jordan at Dusk

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Knowing the beaver come out in the evening, I launched from Porter’s Landing at 7:00 p.m. and sprinted three miles upstream, then turn and paddled slowly and quietly with the current, looking for beaver.  I saw 7 beaver, 3 great blue heron, 2 black-capped night heron, and a belted kingfisher: all miraculous.  I arrived at the launch just as the dark settled in.  By the time I hauled out, this poem had composed itself and was gently asking to be written.

On the Jordan at Dusk

settle into the rhythm…
dip and pull…
breathe…
dip and pull…
breathe…
wiggle
on the keel…

Belted Kingfisher
splashes indigo and rust
on white canvas…

Great Blue Heron
flies low and wide toward me,
and I wonder if I resemble a fish…

pink petals and perfume
droop transfigured into ripe
red rose hips…

evening’s green aromas
drift over the water,
warm and pungent…

silent beaver swim
in the shadows of a gibbous moon,
waning…

Inconsequential

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Walking along Idaho’s Salmon River shore at sunset during a 52-mile float, I began to notice the ridges of tiny underwater dunes.  I thought about how inconsequential the weak waves were, yet how they shaped the dunes.  I thought about how the little things in life may seem inconsequential, but always have important formational significance.

Inconsequential

inconsequential waves
lap the river bank:
a sandy river bank:

in the shallows
long ridges run
along the shore—

not straight, but undulating,
now breaking off
now splitting,

now rejoining—
ridgelines a centimeter high:
and each incoming

and each outgoing
adds to the tiny dunes,
takes away,

reshapes . . .

Fiddle Fever

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I have attended some great concerts in my many years: Journey: Billy Joel; Boston; John Taylor.  But the best concert I ever attended was a free community Concert in the Park in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in the summer 1981.  The band was Fiddle Fever, and I was 17.  From the first note, I was completely captivated.  Their Appalachian bluegrass music was earthy and mystical, happy and tender, evoking generations and adventures past and yet to come, and expertly performed.  The players radiated enthusiasm and utter joy that washed over and through me.  We bought the vinyl and listened to it hundreds of times until it was too scratched to play.  To my delight, I recently found a CD of the original LP, with several bonus tracks.  Thirty-nine years later, I am playing Fiddle Fever again.  I am captivated still.

Silver Spoon Chimes

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Forty years ago my parents loaded the station wagon and drove the family from our New Jersey home to the woods of Maine for a modest vacation.  We stayed at Gray’s Cabins, which had no central heat (but a fireplace) or running water, but an abundance of gorgeous views and rustic nostalgia.  At a small bait shop on a winding country road, while Dad bought lures and earthworms, I stood on the porch admiring a mobile of flattened silver spoons suspended from bent and curled fork tines.  The spoons met each other, as the breeze passed through, with surprisingly rich peals, as from a bell.  For two decades I haunted thrift stores for discarded silver-plate, and made dozens of chimes for family and friends.  I recently pulled out of a box the scattered spoons and fork of my last remaining set of chimes, polished the silver, restrung the spoons, and hung the chimes in my patio, where they tinkle and take me back to the green woods of Maine.

If plated silver is not available, you can make your own set with any inexpensive metal ware.  Tools you will need:

  • hammer
  • rag to buffer the spoons from the hammer and concrete surface as you carefully flatten them
  • power drill with very small drill bit
  • block of wood under the ware as you drill
  • needle-nose pliers
  • fishing line or stout threat (thick string will muffle the spoon vibrations and dampen their sound)
  • nail or hook to hang from

The colder your metal ware, the higher the likelihood the spoons will crack and the tines will break off.  Work with the spoons and fork after leaving them in the sun for a few minutes.

A Portrait of Sunshine as a Young Dragon

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Sunshine began his life of friendship with Amy just seven months ago as a tiny young lizard.  Now he is in full adolescence, and still calm, patient, and pleasant.  Amy thought a portrait of her friend was in order.  Here is her first “peek-a-boo” angle.

And now, Sunshine’s full-color portrait, drawn expertly by Amy.  In Portuguese one would say, “Tal e qual,” meaning “Exactly so.”  Great work, Amy!

Your Package Has Arrived!

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Amy and Sunshine decided to go into the delivery business, called “Delivery Squad.”  Watch out UPS!  Amy did all the initial heavy lifting by building the business headquarters.  And she designed and fabricated a specialty delivery van, backpack, and cap to fit her Bearded Lizard partner.  Perhaps unfortunately, Sunshine can deliver packages only from one side of the dining table to the other.  But the service is personal!

Ready for business!

 

Game Night!

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Every Sunday night Amy’s family gathers for a nice family dinner, a spiritual or musical devotional, dessert, and games.  Even Sunshine joins in, munching his salad and playing along in a game of Sorry.  These special times have been important for Amy’s family bond and strengthen relationships, and could well be replicated in some form by other families.  Enjoy especially the desserts and games–only, Sunshine won’t be on your team!

Osprey Brings a Snake for Her Crying Chick

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During a visit to Greer, Arizona, we played at River Reservoir, where I searched for the Osprey my sister had seen weeks before.  The children canoed and fished for crayfish and napped on a quilt under the pines, while I scanned the sky.  The tree-top nest stood tall in front of me, and I was not disappointed:

Osprey Brings a Snake for Her Crying Chick

on a barkless ponderosa snag
ascending the hill—
a lightning kill—
a nest of rough twigs tangled
in the crook of its crown

a beak rises
peaks out and over
scans from north to south to north again

and from that beak a hunger call:
cry cry cry cry cry cry cry—

then the long wait for the mother

and the regurgitated trout:

              cry cry cry cry cry—

Here she comes!
swooping through pine tops
a snake slack with death dangling
from the ebony nails of her talons

Roger Baker is a municipal attorney, aspiring poet, and amateur naturalist.  He is the author of Rabbit Lane: Memoir of a Country Road.  The book tells the true life story of an obscure farm road and its power to transform the human heart.  The book is available in print and for Kindle at Amazon.  See Rabbit Lane reviewed in Words and Pictures.

Sunshine’s Summer Hat

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With Phoenix Arizona regularly reaching 110F in June, Amy has made sure Sunshine is prepared for the hot sun, with his own straw hat.  Of course, the Bearded Dragon lizard is native to the brutally hot Australian desert.  But whether Sunshine needs a hat or not, Amy is loyal and caring and looks after Sunshine’s every need.

Sunshine on my Shoulder

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The iconic John Denver song gained a new dimension for me when I met Sunshine face to face. Sunshine enjoys being held, but his* favorite vantage point is my shoulder, where he sits contentedly, blinking now and again, but otherwise quite still. But he’s not partial to my shoulder, necessarily, as you can see.

Sunshine on Amy’s shoulder
Sunshine on my shoulder
Sunshine on Hyrum’s shoulder

(*I just learned that Sunshine is a male Bearded Dragon!)

Not the Zip Line!

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Amy loves riding the zip line her dad built in the back yard.  What a thrill for to speed through the air.  But this is one activity where Sunshine says, Leave me out!  The whirring metallic sound of the pulley racing over the cable alarms the lizard, and is the only sound or event that has caused her to gape and frill.  And that’s okay.  Sunshine doesn’t have to like everything!