The Green Orbs

JPhoto

(This story was part of a contest, which had a theme. The theme was to write a 3-minute
story whereby the voice in the story was to leave a message on someone's answering machine.)

“Hello John. You won’t believe what I am about to tell you. The desert sun is setting out here as the sky burns with broad swaths of red and orange, yet there appears to be a green orb flashing in the foreground. I am standing before my picture window facing the vast open ranch land filled with grazing cattle. The green orb is coming closer becoming distinct. The shape is oblong with flashing lights.

It has now stopped about a half-mile away but remains as high in the sky as a flyover jet airliner. The vehicle remains still for the moment. Wait. Whoa! It has now shifted directions. It moved to the north at a very fast clip. You could say, the blink of an eye. But now it soared in the opposite direction at just as fast a rate.

It now is still. Hovering in the sky. Two other green flashing orbs have joined it. The color is of a deep forest green, although, very glossy. Sparkly. The sun is setting and the horizon is ablaze with wide swooping strokes of red, orange and yellow.

I am alone in the house. My dog Jones is also standing at the window. He sees the orbs, too. The hair on his neck is standing straight up in the air, and he is beginning to whine.

I don’t know what to make of this. I am feeling really anxious. What if it lands right out here? What do I do?

This message is to tell you that if I am no longer here this is why.

Hold on here! The green orbs are now joined by 6 more. These are white in color. There are now 9 orbs hovering in the sky to the south of me. They are now orbiting one another. Wait! They are coming closer now. They are spreading out to what looks like several hundred yards from down here. In the center are the three green orbs in a triangular formation, but all around them in a circular design are the other 6 equal distant from one another.

They continue to come closer!! Holy shit!! They are heading for the desert!! The cows

are all coming together congregating into a large herd and bellowing loudly. They are all calling out in unison!! What is happening? I am really beginning to sweat. My shirt is soaked. Jones runs in circles and then stops to look out the window.

I can see the orbs in detail now. They are oblong saucers. Just like in that old black and white 1960s movie, “The Day The Earth Stood Still!” They have windows all around but are darkly tinted, yet can see there is an amber glow inside the vehicle.

They appear to be a quarter mile up and about a tenth of a mile out. The orbs have all lined up horizontally. The three green ones are now descending, while the white ones are lifting. There is no sound as they move. The white orbs are very bright and have what looks like portals all around them. They are hovering around 500 yards above the green ones.

I am now holding binoculars and can see that on the underside are four smaller portals the size of car tires. In the center is a larger one the diameter of a tractor rim.

One green orb has separated from the others, and is now slowly moving toward the house.

It has landed 100 yards in front of me! Oh my God! It is opening up, John! It is opening!

...Beep.”

(596 words)

Running From Rural Illinois

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. This image ran through his mind as he stepped through the open door of the sharecropper’s one room shack situated in the overgrown farm field alongside the rail fence lining the very secondary rural two-lane. This was a side road with no center line. Farm fields lined both sides of the blacktop.

The two young men parked the old flat black 1958 Plymouth four-door along the drainage ditch, climbed over the fence and walked into the dilapidated wood structure back in 1968, while living in west-central rural Illinois.

The two would cruise the back roads checking our their newly settled haunt after moving in from Chicago to attend a small college set in a town of 150 people. One day they found an abandoned vintage Morgan automobile buried within a stand of tall weeds. It had rear directional arrows that were signaled a turn, as well as an all wood chassis. The car would have sought more attention in the hands of a collector, than in the destructive throws of nature; but there it sat hidden from most eyes.

On this particular day, the two walked through the door of what would have been the home of a person, or two, who suddenly left quickly without hesitation. Old print dresses, and worn shirts hung in an open shallow closet. Cans of food left unopened on shelves.

This home for a transient worker had a twin bed in the corner. A soiled crazy quilt with torn squares of cotton, wool, and corduroy patched together lay on the bed. An outhouse attached to the side of the old plywood wall provided those inside from running out into the bitter Illinois winter’s cold.

A water well pump adjoined the iron-stained porcelain kitchen sink alongside the knife scored grey speckled-on white linoleum countertop. At the end of what constituted a kitchen was a very used two-burner bottled gas stove.

  

Pots of what might have been dinner were abandoned on the gas stove, were dried and rotten. A closed Bible and newspaper lay open amongst forks, knives, and plates set on the table.

The two stood before the scene in haunting amazement drawing from deep impressions of what might have forced one to flee for their lives in the heat of this frightening nightmare.

Could this snapshot of lost time have happened in 1964, as was printed at the top of the newspaper? Was there darkness pending in that month of July as men in white hoods and burning torches walked the lonely blacktopped back road rousing sounds of anger and violence arousing mountains of fear as a mob approached the insolated shack?

Did the farm worker look out the kitchen sink window in horror as a stirring glow of flaming evil lit the night? Did she, and maybe another, grab their valuables, jackets and hats, before they ran, while never looking back as they escaped into the crop rows fleeing into the moonlight?

Where did they go? Who sheltered them? It was clear that whatever happened that night left that moment in time fully intact like a time capsule allowing someone to stumble upon this place to see it untouched and preserved as it once had been.

Tethered

JPhoto

She was short in stature but tall in the trees. What was carried in her pocket were a whole lot of daydreams.  Resting high in a 100 year old grand majestic oak, she suspended upon the ropes and boot clamps holding on with her back against a strong limb. Dressed in Carhart, her pole saw extended dislodging dead limbs from perches, while the 18 inch Stihl hung from a cord tied to her belt.

Below stood her assistant ready to untie freshly cut branches she lowers down. The view atop the canopy glowed with bright sun from her post upon the tallest tree majestically towering above the hill overlooking the vast rolling valley below blanketed with thick woodland growth surrounding a handful of ten acre and larger estates encasing these properties with split rail fencing. Gazing out over the land, she dreams of a small hand built home nestled among the oaks and maples which is the world she finds most comforting.

In this place where few people go, she escapes tethered to trees perched among the hawks and crows and other winged creatures. Insects crawl. Beetles burrow. Worms inch. Bees gather. Squirrels roost.

She loves this upper world where life thrives endlessly, but one must watch with keenness, otherwise its life will go unnoticed. The green strands of tiny blossoms upon the oak dangle around her as bees, like small delivery vehicles, collect pollen grains for their ride home all the while she stares at their plump yellow and black fuzzy bodies gracefully moving from blossom to blossom occasionally bumping into one another revving their body’s motor as a warning to stay clear. They are indifferent to their silent admirer.

Riding the warm air currents 20 feet above basking in the joy of the moment a hawk draws spirals above her head. Its clean white underbelly with its fanned red tail glistens in the glaring sun. Its keen visual sense kept on high alert for any scampering small sized mammal rustling through the layers of debris blanketing the loamy ground below.

There’s peace high above the hustling and rushing maze that lives below. Time slows to where one listens to the wind vibrating the newly emerged buds, blossoms and foliage. Branches brush up against each other. Limbs creek and sway. Her own breath is the chorus to nature’s rhythmical sounds.

Her assistant below waits patiently for her mind to return to her work. A cloud pattern acting out the appearance of a person’s head with a smiling mouth tumbling over began to drift past, while morphing into a hand with the image of an index finger points north.

She looks out in the direction to see what might be there on that distant hilltop. Could it be a small herd of deer nursing newly birthed fawns covered in a coat of circular pale spots?

She sees circular patterns as the nature of her ever-changing cycle along with the passing seasons, which, too, alters life. Deer herds roam; yet, return to their familiar places day after day.

Lofting high in the trees presents her with a fully dynamic panoramic view of the world that stretches far beyond the small one when one stands upon the earth’s surface.

Her heart begins to race and her breath shallower as she gazes out at the splendor that expands the landscape, which was created out of its own doing as a result of the never ending cycles that nature places upon itself.

She glances below watching her assistant holding the rope upon which is a newly cut limb as he guides it to the ground. She waves down to him. He smiles up in return knowing how content she feels up there. (618 word count.)

Wait and See

JPhoto

There was this man who walked to work the same way everyday. He walked upon the same particular cracks with the same part of his shoes. He did not stray from his familiar path when either going to the office or returning home. He wore gray or blue suits with a white shirt and solid black ties. The shoes were black full oxford brogues with “W” tooled toe box designs. A black jazz styled pork pie hat sat upon his head. He spoke to no one and sat quietly on the subway car seat preferring the aisle, if at all possible.

His mind thought of running from the ordinary world in which he lived. He was a man stuck in the mundane, yet wishing to escape it. He cycled back from the present moment to the future. He always answered questions about the time and place that lied ahead with, “wait and see”. He had a wait and see life.  The job that filled his day was one that kept him isolated and in his head.

Drifting thoughts of walks on woodland trails stopping to sit on a log listening to a stream flow below. Crows speaking together in packs deciding if the man sitting below is a friend of the wild world. Shedding the suit for jeans and flannel with a ball cap to shade his eyes, with soft shoes for his feet, all made him close his eyes in his office chair. Wait and see.

He was a man, yet acted like a mother who wouldn’t let go. He was an emotional caregiver carrying the weight of an empty wife, and damaged children. He thought he was the protector, but instead, wounded himself. Instead of being a pillar, he was a pile of rubble. The dream of a time that would be all his own was faraway in that place of wait and see.

On this day, he entered the elevator to travel to the 16^th floor, where he would enter it on the ground floor, alone; but, standing before him, under the brightly lit domed fixture was a woman in a red skirt wearing a red jacket over her gray blouse, standing there in the shiny metal box looking back at him. He entered and stood next to this stranger, then pushed the button that would lift him up to his destination.

She touched his hand and said her name was Eleanor and she had been waiting for him. He turned only his head in her direction with the look of curious fear across his face. “You were waiting for me? I don’t know you. Who are you? Should I know you?”

She smiled and answered back, “Yes, and no to the final three.” The elevator stopped. The door opened on the 15^th floor. He looked up at the round, lighted number selections noticing that he was not at his destination. His index finger touched the number 16 but the doors did not shut. Nothing moved. There he was with Eleanor, and no one else was around. The floor was empty. The space was cleared of all things. She got off. Then turned, smiled and said, “ Bye for now, James”, which was his name. The doors closed and up to the next floor he went.

The doors opened as they usually did to what was his familiar office space. As he walked off, a co-worker walked past, then, looked strangely at him, as if it was not him, Mr. Pork Pie Hat.

Compelled, James walked to the stairwell, opened the heavy metal door, then down the steel steps surrounded by concrete walls to the 15^th floor. He had never been there before, and opened up that door. He found a large space filled with office cubicles, and people rushing about. There he stood frozen watching activity that for most, would be commonplace. But, of course, for James, it gave him a spinal rush of coldness.

He turned, walked back up the single flight of stairs, opened the door to where he worked, and then down the hall to his office, where he sat down in his familiar padded high back chair, then, with deliberate calmness, took hold of a tack pin and pricked himself to see if he was really awake. He was, without a doubt, very much in the present. Sitting straight up, starring at the calming Monet poster framed 10 feet from him on an off-white wall, he gazed at the water lilies floating in shades of blue and green reflections wondering what just happened to him. He drew a blank. His imagination stood still. Nowhere to go.  At that moment, without hesitation, he picked up the yellow file folder lying before him and opened it. (793 words.) 

Stories of Lost Days

by jphoto

 In the far dark corners of the room lie deep, old, private stories. The place with its sterile feeling had pictures of grandchildren displayed upon the on windowsill, and, in the center was one framed with braided metal threads, standing vertical, shot in black and white tones of his deceased wife of 42 years taken dozens of years ago arms around each other young and beginning life.

Today he is dying slowly at 86 left in a nursing home by his daughter who rarely visits. Sharing the other bed in the room is a 92 year old also dying slowly sitting in a wheelchair facing a lit wall with nothing to see as oxygen flows into his nose through tiny tubes, sustaining his life, wrapped around his ears to keep it all in place.

Their lives filled with past worlds quietly held inside unless asked. Like a juke box loaded with single song records, their voices can tell stories of a lost time forgotten by many, while never shared by some held deep within the soul boxed and compressed pushed under piles of lost thoughts. A press of a button spins the tale.

Both men get dialysis twice a week, eat in their room because the dining hall is too discomforting. One lies in bed watching television, the other sits staring into nowhere. On his bedside tray is a partially filled snack bag, along with cups of water with lids, his urinal, and candy bars.

The conversation contained a hoping desire to return home, which appeared to be a losing dream. A return home would require more than what the one living there now could provide. The older man’s elderly wife doesn’t have the strength to lift her frail life partner who is unable to stand alone. The other man’s daughter appears to not want to be the sole caregiver to her own father who might find himself lost in the apartment hallway after stepping outside his cocooned space drifting further away from what would be most familiar.

Stories flowed from both as the three of us sat closely talking of the old days that formed their lives. The Second War had one in the Pacific as a fighter pilot’s tail gunner, and the other rode a Liberty ship as a Merchant Marine sailing from the Pacific to the Atlantic harboring in Australia, along side Chinese cargo vessels, roaming Sydney’s streets dancing the evening in the nightclubs far from the vast battlefield theaters. While docked in Italy, a German bomber attacked his ship exploding chards of metal breaking his legs, ultimately sending him home after 4 years at sea and war.

The older man returning from his tour unharmed went back to his hometown to design, and build valves for the rest of his working life. The younger man moved about the upper Midwest in search of a place to settle. Detroit lured him to a Dodge Motor Company auto plant close to his hometown in Ohio. Later, he found himself in Pittsburgh building electric heating elements for 40 years. At a big band dance, unable to artfully move his legs due to his injuries, he met his lifelong dream partner. As the dance ended, he drove her home knowing that he would never be without her.

Today both men alone in their rooms, after decades of setting suns, and as the sky changes from daylight to darkness, listen to the carts of food, bedding, medications being pushed up and down the halls. A smiling face enters their tiny space with a package of cookies for each and a word of encouragement.

We sit together talking as if huddled around a kitchen table sharing stories of our lives. Throughout the short 90 minute visit, both men smiling, joyful, and happy to be briefly cared for by a visitor.

Paper Airplanes In Flight

JPhoto

Outside winter’s display window, a lamppost lit steady falling snow all through the setting nightfall and on toward dawn. A single street lamp casted shadows into his third floor apartment office room, as he sat staring out the double-paned glass hypnotized by the accumulating snow narrowly stacking upon the ledges and roofs, which were at eye level. The gently dancing crystalized flakes lit up like luminescent schools of miniature tropical fish swimming in a giant deep ocean fishbowl. 

His room was dark except for a single curved antique lamp with its fluted glass shaped shade pointing down toward his wicker wastebasket. The deflected light brought a mood to the room that he desired, since he wanted to curl up inside his pile of woolen blankets, then burrow deep in his well-worn brown corduroy stuffed easy chair, which was a hand-me-down from his grandmother after the estate was settled, to watch the night pass silently by.

Evening snows invite silence, and the body’s need to be securely wrapped up in warmth while mesmerized by nature’s frosty rain. If it were summer, he might have the windows open listening to the droplets tap upon the window glass, but the silent snow fell as quietly as clouds drifting across the night’s sky. The absence of its sound was mystifying. 

As a child, he spent time in his room folding paper airplanes into various designs sending them through the air toward hanging targets and wastebaskets. He would lay on his bed, pillows propped up against the corner wall tossing handmade paper airplanes at his simple hanging targets that hung from kite string taped upon the ceiling. Now an adult, this historical pastime continued. He folded them without looking, and often in the dark, feeling his way along the edges of the paper with delicate precision and skill. His fingers took their time caressing the corners of the specially chosen sheets, which were picked from the stacked trays storing the various grades offered to him.

His mind often needed distraction when it could not drop anxious and repetitive thoughts into the available mental depository in order to shrink each one into rubble suitable for discard knowing that this place inside his mind would gently disarm what were actually of minimal importance.

Tonight he folded airplanes using his lightest weighted paper and tossing them at each of his two hanging Alexander Calder mobiles purchased while at the Smithsonian museum last summer when visiting a friend in Washington, DC. He enjoyed spinning the mobiles in this way, which made him feel like he had stretched beyond the mundane and into the realm of skill, like arranging the colors on a Rubik’s Cube into desired patterns.

He had lingering and nagging thoughts. Ones that would wake him at 3 A.M. wanting immediate resolution, which stressed him because it was more than likely there was not one available that would drift him back into soothing sleep.  His dreams had him on long bus rides missing stops, whereby he would have to then ride another one back to where he should have gotten off. Other dreams had him in apartments or rooms he did not recognize uncertain of what to do next.

In order to return to calm, he would sit up in his dark bedroom, pick up one of his airplanes creasing it back into a single dimension, and then fan it open tossing it toward the illuminating hallway night light. On the floor by his nightstand were several paper airplanes idly waiting for flight parked in a small box.

This activity was meditative; no mantra, no teacher, no method, only the flight of paper airplanes. Watching them move silently through the bedroom air quieted his mind drawing him away from noisy thoughts as each one soared below blue ceiling tiles toward the dim light of the hallway, tapping into memories of his youth, in silence, once more.

After several minutes he lied back down and fell back into sleep, while outside the snow quickly piled high deadening all of the evening sounds. (591 words)

The Gift

JPhoto

Chris and Mirriam moved onto her grandmother’s farm in New Hampshire not far from the White Mountains where her great-grandfather hid out as the First World War broke out. He was a pacifist resisting conscription into the American army. As an immigrant from Austria, he resisted a forced return to spill blood on the soil he remembered as home (so dearly). He bought a large farm with family money he inherited prior to landing on the shores of Newfoundland, Canada. He and others made their way down to New Hampshire to work as a tree climbers and fellers for hire as lumber went for the war effort.

As a young child, he fearlessly climbed every tree he saw in the small village outside of Graz scaling to cloud entangling tree limbs. In New Hampshire, he steadily scaled and trimmed trees on the estates of the wealthy industrialists.

An elderly shipping magnate moved onto his summer estate escaping the Boston high society culture he found repellent. The interest in trees and arbor studies linked these two men together as spring is to summer. The elderly man told Merriam’s great-grandfather that he had an overgrown farm nearby that he no longer wanted and suggested he take it off his hands if he would care for it properly. “Of course,” was the answer; as it had been said.

The gift was 300 acres of old growth timber, scrub trees that over powered the farm fields, a largely solid two-storied 1880s fieldstone barn filled with rusting farm implements of the time, and a semi-burned down farmhouse.

Merriam’s mother, who inherited the land after her mother’s death, had not returned, nor anyone else, for10 years. The old fieldstone barn had been converted into a giant home by her great-grandfather, who became a skilled stonemason during his lifetime.

The old man cultivated and planted hundreds of seedlings, formed into orchestrated woodlands of pines, spruces, larches, oaks, maples, and trees from seeds gathered from other forests visited now nearing 100 years old. Inside some of the treed landscapes were stone benches, planters, organic sculptures, and walls as tall as 10 feet high laid in circular, curved, or just straight formations not seen unless one were to hike into that living wooded montage.

The young couple mesmerized by the wildness of the land with its densely canopied tree topped home filled with generational animal life roaming and flying felt the stronger heartbeat to the land. They unwrapped and uncovered great-grandfather’s handmade stone treasures, nestled within overgrown shrubs and tall trunks of trees; and, while doing so the stonemason’s medieval hideaway tower with its arched open windows, and iron railings, along with a wide flowing creek running around it and a stone moss covered bridge crossing it was revealed.

All paths were undetectable and overgrown mystifying their explorations. The two crossed the bridge, and found the entrance opening with a log staircase leading to the open circular room surrounded by its guardian woodland offering a view of the landscape from almost 20 feet above the loamy earth. The distant rolling landscape was visible from one arched lookout, or the dense forest from another. Each framed window offering views of a vibrant and pulsating natural world as its moist breath evolved and changed this enchanting place over decades.

More steps led to the rooftop parapet not unlike a castle’s turret. Carved into the wall surrounding the entire circumference read, “To my flesh and blood, finally arriving, to live, pray, and gaze in awe, I give you this place of peace-1926.”  It was here that their life found new love. (599 words)

A Wilderness Haunted

JPhoto

 “Some people swore the house was haunted; but just maybe, it was the landscape that surrounded it.” whispered the old timer living just outside this West Virginia wilderness area silently crouching beside the campfire alongside my tent site.

“I’m not sure what you mean?” was my uneasy response to this eerie figure. “This landscape is haunted, as well as haunting to those of us who know the story. We feel it; smell it; see it. Stories get passed down, but to you visitors, ya weekenders, you don’t know ‘em.”

“Know what?” I asked as the winds blew up across this high tundra plateau with its grassland open meadows, and low growing spruce, pine, and hemlock along with massive moraine debris spewed throughout the thousands of acres of dry landscape, like a bowling ball boulder graveyard formed into cliffs, and riverbeds. We sat upon stool sized logs watching the dusk turn to complete darkness as the campfire flames bent east then south following directional winds arching like the organically fluid body of a modern dancer.

A planetarium of stars and constellations exploded upon the all-connecting giant sky from every direction flickering and pulsating the heartbeats of heaven. Green valleys and forested mountaintops lay just beyond the veil of darkness.

“Near this spot a frontiersman handcrafted a stone and timbered cabin which to hunt from and tan hides that he sold to villagers below. Bear, deer, bobcat, and panther roamed this wilderness. It been a frightening landscape to most livin’ in the hollers and hills aneath. But he came here alone lookin’ for somethin’ he didn’t share with no one.”

“You say it’s haunted. What was haunted?”

The old timer answered, “The cabin was haunted. And because the cabin got haunted, the whole place turned haunted. This entire wilderness became a haunted land.”

“What haunts the earth here are the spirits of dead bear. The restless soul of a single dead bear, it is said, callin’ the souls of other dead bear to bellow from aneath the trees when the whistlin’ winds blow down from the North.”

“The stories tell a time when bear roamed this landscape. These were huge and powerful bear with the blackest fur polished shiny by the starry Gods forming Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. They ruled this landscape feedin’ off of the deer and foolhardy men who thought they were a match for these divinely hallowed creatures.”

“The legend has it that a lightnin’ fire struck a stand of dried out pine and spruce spookin’ the wildlife to run for safety. The frontiersman smellin’ the smoke from inside his cabin saw a furl of flyin’ flames in the distance. A storm began to blow in from the North with high winds pushin’ the burnin’ South away from his cabin.”

“What he didn’t expect to see was a scorched giant black bear coming out of the forest leapin’ over boulder piles as if they didn’t exist. Seein’ the frontiersman, the massive creature reared upon its hind legs, bellowed a deadly roar and rushed toward ‘em.”

“Upon fearin’ for his life, he ran into the cabin closin’ then latchin’ shut the thick solid wooden door. Armin’ himself with his single shot rifle and attached bayonet, the bear lunged through the door as the man unloaded into the bear’s skull with both the blade and the bullet.”

“The giant bear then fell upon the woodsman, buryin’ its teeth into his skull. The two died together. Their restless souls intertwined occupyin’ the space and the land forever. And nothin’ was the same again after that.”  (596 words.)

[This was written for the “3-Minute Fiction’s 5^th round contest sponsored by NPR radio. The parameters were the story had to be under 600 words and use this sentence as your first sentence, “Some people swore the house was haunted.” And, for your last sentence you were instructed to use “And nothing was the same again after that.”]

As It Was Remembered

JPhoto

The days passed one-by-one bundled into memories then rolled into decades. The experience was a haunting visual. We were just kids. Dares innocently escalating. Feats grew bigger than the last. We were only 15 when Joe began planning his “surprise”. He told Mo and me he would show us his “big adventure” when he was ready. He “had to prepare”. We did not know what he meant but it sounded risky.

Joe liked it dangerous. He would taunt rattlers. He found it thrilling to squat quietly down to the ground, steady still hands reaching, finger tips delicately propped on the dirt, near the entrance to a rattlesnake’s den, keenly watching one sliver over with it triangular spoon shaped head to his barefoot frog-like toes; and then, with the vaulting precision of a predator’s pounce, his hand firing a piercing surgical grasp upon the back of it’s head momentarily stunning it before finally reacting in fear, eyes glaring through its vertical pupil slits, tongue gyrating feverishly, as he grabbed the furiously loud rattling tail with his other hand. Its black striped back with that red ridgeline flashing in our own eyes like a neon sign at midnight on a hauntingly dark empty street.

With the attention and caution of a wild animal trainer, he moved, but his spirit was full of laughter and joy. “Mo. Brent. Come check out my Canebraker!” He approached everything he did in this way. His fears were so controlled and measured. We deeply respected his dare-devilishness believing his gifts were divinely endowed.

With care, caution and tenderness, he would find a rock, which would act as a barrier between himself and the snake. He would kneel down before the rock, then lean over it, belly flat upon the surface still holding his prisoner, reach out at arm’s length, lay the now quieted and numb rattler on the ground letting it go. Without any defensive response, it would just move along as if nothing had happened. A hypnotic trance had been placed upon the creature through the hands of this young snake charmer.

At the abandoned rock quarry, he would not only dive off the five storied jagged limestone cliffs overlooking the oval walled ten acre spring fed pool below, but perform backward twists and flips into the cold 40 foot deep turquoise colored water. He was a master of the mind and body like no other we who knew him had ever seen before.

We lived close to the Shenandoah Mountains in Virginia. Our hamlet was 15 miles away nestled in the fertile farmland below. We could see the rooftops of each other’s homes across the plowed fields of wheat and corn with two mountain ranges in the background from my front yard porch. The summer sunset sky would go ablaze with burning hues of orange and yellow and red streaks.

Often we would take overnight pack hikes into the mountains along the trails in very late spring when the Mountain Laurel was in bloom lining our way with their fragrant small delicate white or pink blossoms adorned with nine red spots encircling those same many star pointed clusters of delicate flowers. The mountain-bred deer gentle enough to walk close if one sat and talked to them in a quiet, soothing tonal voice. Spotted faun would prance in full view entertaining anyone willing to watch.

The three of us, and occasionally others, would hike one to two nights sleeping on the ground with our thinly warn down bags along the trail listening to the sound of fast running water just a few feet away, while the sky filled with dancing meteors, as we stared upon the gloriousness of the endless array of constellations.

Our bond as friends went very deep. We called ourselves Amigos, and could read the minds and thoughts of each other.

We loved Overall Run Falls and hiked all around the trails surrounding the series of cascading cliffs where the rushing waters fell to the bottom a swift seven miles from the top.

It was on this warm summer Saturday in July with its rare dry breeze blowing threw the trees and across the wide expanse of rock and cascading river falls. At the top, Joe said, “I am ready for “my adventure”. I am going to do it today. I feel ready.” Ready for what, I said? “I am going over the falls, and I need you to be my witness.” “And don’t try to tell me different. I have my mind made up. I’m doin’it guys. So let it be. Just help me. OK?”

He pulled out from the bottom pack roll tied to his old Kelty backpack a helmet, goggles, a full wet suit with gloves and booties, and three inner tube tires and a pump. Riveted to the back and bottom of the football helmet, that dangled from the pack’s aluminum frame, was a plastic plate that was 14 inches long going down his spine which strapped under his arms across his chest. Two motorcycle inner tubes were tied together around his waist after being pumped up. The third was from a kid’s dirt bike, tied to the other two and loosely secured around his ankles. His homemade flotation device was crazy.

We helped him assemble his contraption as he lay on the ground. We carried him to the edge of the flat water as it tumbled toward the falls. We told him he had to scoot in on his own as we said, “Joe, you can say no to this and no one will ever know. We promise!” “I’m doin’it guys. See ya at the bottom.” “Now, get your butts down the trail to the big, long, flat drop into the gorge and watch me go down. Run. I’ll give ya 10.”

We got to the lookout and saw this tiny black bullet taken down toward the falls. When he got to the vertical sheet of icy rumbling water, his body stiffened riding along the surface attempting to navigate the natural water slide, hugging the right side of the falls plunging into the first horizontal ledge pool surrounded by the gorge, bouncing up and down like a fishing bobber as he soared atop the wide and long roaring second vertical making sure he took the right fork of the fall’s forward-projecting turbulent water, instead of the left-side’s sheer drop both converging into a pool piled with log jamming debris. It was there that we lost sight. The silent fear of death and a horribly mangled body terrorized the entire run down to the bottom four more miles to the final pool where unaware sunbathers waded playfully. Joe yelled on the way down for people to get away. “Get out down there; get out; danger; get out; get out of the way. I’m comin’ down on ya! And, I comin’ down fast!”

Floating in the pool when we reached him, three waders were pulling Joe out. He was laughing and hollerin’ in joy. He made it. A miracle. Intact! We ran to our daredevil friend and he hugged us both as we danced up and down in a ceremonial-like circle holding our strange looking frogman in this impromptu embrace of the fantastic.

Here I stand now at that same lookout starring over the falls remembering that monumental day where my life changed and I knew that challenges could be won if you really wanted them badly enough.

I stand alone watching the water cascade the falls. Joe and Mo coming tomorrow to celebrate what had happened four decades ago, to the day, since we were last here together on that crazy afternoon in July. And, what a great celebration of life tomorrow it will be. (1291 word count)

Farm Truck

JPhoto

Grandpap collected old trucks. He bought or traded just about anything. Pickers knew he had old, rusty vintage relics parked on the farm. Rich kids bought old Chevy panels, or Ford pickups to have restored that they drove off to college. 

The 300 acre farm sat back on a dirt road after the blacktop ran out near Saratoga Springs, New York. I would spend my summers with him and my grandmother. He taught life. He’d say if the nation ever got shut down for one reason or another, he would keep going. Ir was a real place where work never stopped except at bedtime. 

Farm animals, crops, equipment and fences were daily chores. Trading led to collecting, a thread that bound this hamlet community of self-sustaining farmers.  Neighbors pay one another with an old oak farm table, or in well used and darkened  empty French oak wine barrels, or an old ’48 Ford truck. 

My job was to fix the things that he had no time for. Engine repair, furniture rebuilding, fence stringing, and hay stacking were my assignments. The pickers would often come by buying up what we had around. I would fix up the wooden pieces in the barn using shop tools under grandpap’s eye, and the buyers from New York City hauled them back occasionally with an old truck in tow, too. 

Surplus produce was packed and sold to gourmet private chefs cooking for Wall Street tycoons and owner’s of expensive restaurants with pricey wine lists, and white pressed linen tableclothes. The hamlet evolved into an underground cooperative economy, while the junk buyers became food vendors for the farm kitchen bakers of breads, pies, cakes, cheeses, goat milk, beef, lamp, eggs, and more. 

Grandpap bred this farm collective and those who has struggled now prospered. Word spread among strangers who arrived offered to sell their dusty, barn stored discards. I would repair them, which found their way into Manhattan antique shops. This was real. This all had meaning. People helping people. My suburban school life meant less and less. I desired to remain and enroll in the nearby rural high school upon parent approval.  Ninth grade would be a trial run. To live with grandpap and grandma instead of home ran over me like mineral water from a soothing hot springs pool. The farm life of my mother reached into me as it did her. The community’s embrace penetrated deep like blood and veins acting together to feed the heart, and from there, all the organs and cavities reaching into the body’s core. What existed there was unique; antithetical to suburbia. 

To know when something is real is not to be forsaken, or ignored, or dismissed. When it comes to you, at any age, take it in. Hold it tightly with a comforting embrace. 

Living on a cul-de-sac, surrounded by too many similar, although unfamiliar, cul-de-sacs where people rushed everywhere and believing they needed to do so, otherwise precious valuable time, a commodity to many, would be unnecessarily wasted. I had seen both sides at the time. There was a difference. I knew it then, and know it now. 

There I felt and  touched something real. Its smells were real, too. The eyes of a cow, the blades of a bird’s feather, the warmth of an egg, the smell of fresh cut green hay, the taste of new milk. It had meaning. Nothing wasted. Time sacred; never hurried. One could look longer than a gaze, and see without distraction, and watch with clarity, and believe with 

understanding. 

There are many worlds. We can move from one into another. They are all a part of one, but inside there are smaller systems. In that place just outside of Saratoga Springs was a very small world, with individual moons rotating around it maintaining a rotational harmony solid and intact. The world back home was one that felt out of sync, and lacked harmony outside the front door of our home. There was a media pulse driving it forcing it off course and into multiple directions. But, on the farm one felt the anchoring of gravity holding us upon the earth with every step and every breath. (Max. word count 700.)

SIGNS OF THAW

JPhoto

A drive in the country was a hobby my father loved to do most anytime he had the chance. Working in an office, leafing through legal books, studying case law made him feel caged in like a zoo animal that was exhibiting nervous stress knowing that life had its boundaries and there was no escaping it. So, to unwind and relax he would get in his weekend play toy-a 1967 canary yellow Camaro S.S convertible with double wide black racing stripes emblazoned upon the hood and trunk. The tires were beefy mounted on shiny dished chrome wheels. This was his wild thing. There was nothing tame about it. He loved the deep, haunting growl that the engine forced out through the straight piped dual exhaust when we pulled away from our red brick ranch with attached sunporch framed in jalousie windows separating the house from the two car garage. My sister would willingly stay home with mom watching cartoons dressed in her white flannel pajamas and furry pink slippers cozied up in that glassed room with its plush tan wall-the-wall carpet.

His weekend car made him feel free. Dad could put the week’s stress all behind him as he settled into the black bucket driver’s seat trimmed in shiny chrome piping. I loved to ride with him. 

He would wake up early on Saturday, pull out the road atlas from the bookshelf in the family room where a set of World Book Encyclopedias were displayed with pride, and choose a route that would take a few hours to cover. 

We had a subscription to National Geographic and the entire family would take turns reading then dreaming of the the vividly documented adventures. On Saturday dad would live his own, and I would ride along. He was the camel driver taking us through the landscape of our version of an exotic far-away place.

He thoughtfully marked the map with a freshly sharpened number 4HB red pencil and I would be his navigator. My job made me feel important like Tonto must have quietly realized as he showed the way to the Lone Ranger as they rode through canyon mountain passes.  His joy was to get into the countryside as quickly as possible, while I directed him along the rural two-lanes. 

We lived in a large town in eastern West Virginia. Country people called it a city, although it never got that close. The towns and hamlets on our route were filled with coal miners and loggers. Some roads were still hard packed dirt, which reminded us of another time when horses pulled farm wagons to town, to the granary, or the auction barn. The kids dressed like their working class parents and appeared older than they actually were. The boys wore ball caps with the company logo sewn on the front, faded and collar worn flannel shirts, and, if lucky, a Sears hood parka rimmed in fake fur for those cold days that required more. For some, televisions were only for “rich folks” which meant the kids spent time together, outside, experiencing their own brand of wild.

Jilly’s General Store, and gas station, Milton’s Pharmacy, Blazer and Sons Work Wear, Happy Foods grocery, and others like them sustained communities making them whole and grounded offering a home for those who wanted to stay or too afraid to leave. 

Dad would find a soda fountain store on a ‘Main Street’ and park. He would go inside, telling me to watch the car, and buy us a couple bottles of Cream Soda, or Old Fashioned Root Beer, along with hot dogs with all the fixings resting on a square of waxed paper lining  a red and white checked cardboard boat. We would sit in the car, the top down even if it was a chilly early spring day eating our lunch.

A gathering of kids, often riding bikes heading somewhere, maybe to the local river or stream to watch the thick muddied rushing, rising flood of white-capped waters as the snow melts, from intermittently warm sunny days, creating a torrent of sound; or off to play baseball for the first time after the long frozen winter, which stuck around longer than most desired, begins to show signs of thaw.

I remember biting into my hot dog when I saw two boys, only a few feet away, on their way to somewhere, stop like I would do soaking up the brilliantly colored exotic images in the National Geographic magazine, watching me in that same dreamy way with soft grins possibly wanting a chance at my little adventure, too.

By J 

(Offerings must have less than 780 word count.)