Happy Halloween

Have a safe and fun day my friends, whatever you brew up.

The Sounds That Wait in the Silence

While preparing a simple supper of soup, bread and coffee after a long cold day recently, I remembered being little, and eating something similar when feeling run down - Chicken Noodle Soup, Saltines and 7-Up.

I was actually a pretty tough little kid, breaking my arm twice in the course of the summer one year, the first, running and tripping over a piece of sidewalk dislodged upward by a tree root, the second a major spill off of my bike while my brother and I were playing "Man from Uncle", 3 days out of the first cast (my Mom was NOT happy).

But if we got a cold or the flu, we were kept in bed, kept warm and left with a little bell to summon Mom if we needed anything.  We didn't abuse that, not bothering her unless we needed to, but there was something comforting, knowing that if we needed a drink, or just a hug, she was there. Mom herself, was battling cancer, and we had that intuitive sense, even that young, that our troubles were little, compared to hers, and tried to be quiet and considerate.

For on such mornings, there would no noise in the house, but for Mom's labored breath, and occasionally the little tinkled chime of a glass bell

That bell is one of the earliest memories of sound I have.  There were others, the sounds of the kitchen, as  Mom baked something. I remember the sound of the front door, a heavy hardwood door that shut with the announcement of "Dad's home!". Dad would walk in and kiss my Mom. Not a peck on the lips, but a long kiss and she'd giggle, there with flour on her face and that is the sound I first remember.

As I prepared something to nourish me again I thought of such sounds - from here within the silence. Morning in the forest, the world is silence but for the draw of your breath.

People talk of the quietness of the wilderness. But is it? Is any place? Certainly not the city, from which we shout our way home each day, automobiles yielding not by law or logic, but by some order of survival of the fittest.

When I was first drawn to the woods, seeking quiet and perhaps sustenance, I never realized the varied depths of sound in the woods. First there was my own sounds, body defying that bitch that is gravity, hauling myself up the tree stand with all the tactical grace of a draft horse. My breath came in hot wet bursts and every step seemed a kettle drum in the darkness. When I got up and settled, I expected only quiet, my senses tuned to anything that would indicate a whitetail was headed my way.

The first sound  you'll hear as you are there in the woods, is the birds. A woodpecker off in the distance, the sound stopping as abruptly as it started, as if it were only an echo you heard. Then, the soft chirps and peeps as the sun first comes up. The sounds of that time when the owl ceases flight, passing the baton to the predators of the day as the wet, grey light illuminates their flight. Then silence, as overhead the form of a hawk passes, the sparrows cry but a dinner bell of a feathered hors d'oeveres. It's a melody of life, gone silent in fear as the whoosh of wing sweeps overhead. The hawk is gone, riding an updraft away to a tune only he can hear. As quickly as it was hushed, the sounds are back, as I settle back into the blind to the chorus of hungry birds.
But morning passes and the birds twitter off into the serene efficiency of food gathering. The quiet hangs pensively between trees and rocks that alight with small creatures, freed as prey of the night, searching for food. Rivers move in the distance, the streams complain, a fish jumps, the sound at the limit of your hearing as the forest floor, green with calm, pools around all.

Sounds emerge and fade -

The wind through the treetops as a thunderstorm does a drive by.

A dying tree tapping its own chest, then falling into sleep as the wind finishes its work, leaving without notice.

The slick of a knife as it cuts into the apple that is lunch.
It's not easy sitting still, sitting in what others would call silence, listening only to the hearts whispered confidences, conversing silently with your own regrets.

But if you are patient, and you are completely still, there in the distance you may hear it. Not the birds nor the brook, but the soft crunch of leaves, scarcely a sound yet, almost sound anticipated, yet to reach the ear. There it is again, drifting into your hearing, then ebbing away again, sound dying softly on a trail that's leading away from you. It's gone.

You tell yourself it was a three legged, one eyed, scrawny button buck not worthy of the shot, while down inside you have a mental picture of tines with a spread of two and a half feet and a form that blots out all sound.

You knew there are deer here. Creatures living shadowy in the limbo from which time began, moving around and away from time, away from you. Forms moving right around you, as your heart sounds out that beat of time, going too fast. If only you could see with the eyes that all hunters have. You know they are close, moving in and out of the sun's glare, flirting with you with grunts and snorts, hot air from soft muzzles, challenging you to the dual that only one of you will win. They drink from quiet pools in which autumn leaves slowly die, drifting on the cold waters with the motion of sleep.
You've seen the signs, the rubs, the scrapes, those measured indentations made of testosterone and bold youth. Signs of the whitetail, rising out of the deep quiet and the sleep. Look quick, listen close, for soon the marks would be gone, disappearing with astonishing speed as leaves blew past, as if relinquishing themselves back to the earth, where you, the hunter, are but a transient.

You wonder, do they hear me? The sharp intake of breath in the cold air, the hammering of my heart that to me sounds like a cacophony. That sound that pounds in your ears and you imagine every creature in the forest can hear it. When the hunters urge comes on full, strong; legs, arms, muscle, need. Memory from the times before memory existed, wired into us, that comes from those that survive. The moment passes, the sound was but a tree limb coming down, and you are left with the clear lucidity that adrenalin brings, resting your hand, quieting your heart. Be still, so we are not heard. Be still so no one notices the trembling of your form, the tear as it forms in quiet pools. Still, as your body trembles with anticipation.
You look at your watch, not sure why you brought it, a watch is not all that useful here, when the world is driven by sound, by heat and by blood. You keep it not so that you will remember the time, but so you can forget it for just these moments when you're not wasting breath trying to conquer it.

You're only a few miles from a road and if you listen, the tiny intrusions of civilization are heard; the sound of a train, way off, a laboring sound of groaning metal; later in the afternoon, a plane overhead, small sounds that seem foreign out here, and you brush them away with the flies. That world can wait, this is your world, now, all that you need as you hear the sound of your watch and the sound of the train dying away, running through another world that you know exists but you do not occupy.

The outside world fades back to hush, rising only to the occasional stammering of an angry squirrel, who doesn't stop even with cross hairs pointed at him. Do not fire, you tell yourself, as the sound would clear out everything around. Stop, look, wait. Listen.
Then you hear it. The sound is but the slightest of soft breaths in your ear, a tug at your heart, the course of blood through your cold hands, the mute tremble of your thighs. There, upwind, the slightest of pause amongst the leaves, as if something was also listening for you before advancing. The sound stops. The tiny hammer of your heart is an ocean in your ears. The sound starts. Crunch. Crunch. A snort. Testing the air, testing you.

You can not hear his heart beat, only your own, but as he comes into view, you can see the flinch of muscle and hide. Flesh driven by a heart that is insular, standing with a form that, without sound, infers weight and speed. It's speed that will take him far from you if he senses that heart of yours which beats too loudly, with strength born by rending it and building it back up again.
Then as suddenly as the sound comes into your field of view, it stops. Stops, as everything- animal, vegetable, mineral, the trivial uproar of a squirrel and the sun, coalesce into one sound of shuddering breath inward. There he is, fixed in the hot, philandering wind, a beam of sun against the massive rack, as he turns, sniffing, listening for danger. One more moment, one more breath and he'll have you. Instinct draws up the gun.

The birds explode into flight, the noise breaking the lie of silence. The whitetail bolts with a clamor, faint and fading as he breaks the barrier of life, moving on with a boom heard across heaven.. . .

. . .that boom, the sound of a truck door outside, slamming shut, bringing me back from the forested recesses of my daydream to the room around me.  The world has gone back silent again, but for the sound of my breath,  Up on the shelf, lay a small crystal bell, the ancient etchings on  clouded glass, coalescing, into a sense other than sound, a scent, a touch, the whisper of comfort and the smell of hot chicken soup, there in a room only fierce with the sound of alone.

I pick up a little framed photo of a red-haired woman and child, as outside, the melodic chime of birds in the trees, calls upwards to heaven.
 - Brigid

Sconehenge

 

Since I'm half Scottish (not a drop of Irish blood, despite what the nuns named me when I was placed with them), scones are "part of this complete breakfast".

Worth the effort for a nice weekend morning. And playing with your food IS allowed. . . .

Cranberry Orange Scones

Makes approximately 8 scones

2 cups (260 grams) all-purpose flour  (a soft, low protein flour works best such as cake or pastry flour)

1 Tablespoon baking powder 

1/2 teaspoon salt (I use a reduced sodium Himalayan pink salt)

5 Tablespoons (70 grams) cold, unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch cubes

1 cup (235 ml) cold heavy cream, plus more for tops of scones

3 tablespoons honey (I used heather honey)

1 Tablespoon grated orange zest

3/4 cup (100 grams) dried cranberries

1 Tablespoon coarse sugar, for tops of scones

Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat the oven to 425 degrees F. Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper or use a silicon baking mat.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, and the salt in a medium bowl. Combine cream, honey, and orange zest in a measuring jug. Stir until the honey is completely incorporated into the cream.

Use a pastry blender to work the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles a coarse meal with a few small crumbles of butter the size of peas. 

Transfer the dough including the dry, floury bits to a lightly floured work surface. Knead the dough 3 to 5 times until it just comes together. Form into an 8-inch circle. Cut into 8 triangles.

Place scones onto the baking sheet, brush with extra cream and lightly sprinkle tops with coarse sugar. Bake until light golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Cool at least 10 minutes before serving.

Refrigerate leftovers (they also freeze well). To reheat, bake in a 350 degree F oven until warmed. 

You can also freeze unbaked scone dough. Chill cut scones in the freezer until firm, and then transfer to resealable plastic bags. Keep up to three weeks. Bake in a 425 degree F oven straight from the freezer. (They may take a few extra minutes).

On Timing

Doc Holliday:  What did you ever want?

Wyatt Earp:   Just to live a normal life.

Doc Holliday: There's no normal life, Wyatt, it's just life. Get on with it.

Wyatt Earp: Don't know how.

Doc Holliday: Sure you do. Say goodbye to me. Go grab that spirited actress and make her your own. Take that beauty from it, don't look back.  Live every second. Live right on to the end. Live Wyatt. Live for me.   Wyatt, if you were ever my friend -  if ya ever had even the slightest of feelin' for me,
leave now. Leave now... Please.

Timing is everything they say.

In ballistics certainly so. In the outcome of a day even more so.  I missed out on a flight  in a smallish plane some years ago, because I was suddenly sick to my stomach. All aboard died.  My stomach bug was not the flu but a not yet known and unplanned pregnancy.

How many of us, unknowingly, missed a vehicular accident, a violent crime or a whack from mother nature, simply because we forgot our phone and ran back into the house, decided to linger over that nice little .380 in the case, or simply had too much, or too little caffeine.
Timing.

Timing can be good.  It can also be lousy. Missed trains, missed job opportunities.  Missed dreams.  I've heard from more than one guy friend that he was bummed the "girl of his dreams" had found someone. Yet, he never asked her out, couldn't express the feelings until it was too late, sometimes remaining silent for months or even years, growing only older of bone and pride.

Timing.

When we were kids, we ran around with time simply carried in our pocket, as dense and round as a coin, many coins, that jingle as we ran. We are told by some grownups that we soon will have to grow up and leave childish dreams behind, but we don't listen, because we have nothing in our experience to gauge their caution by, to give the portent of a structured future any range and meaning.  Besides we are too busy, just doing things that kids do, even if that was just sitting and waiting for hours for a fish to bite a tiny hook.

Then, seemingly overnight, we fell into that grown up, carefully measured and timed world, picking up our watch in the process. The dreams of childhood passed behind as we jumped on board a fast moving train, losing our innocence before we even fully realized we possessed it.
As adults we are governed by time, watches, and cell phones and alarm clocks and schedules.  Mechanical clocks and biological ones. We rush headlong into actions without considerations, as if the sheer and simple arranged succession of days was not fast enough, constituted without capacity enough, so that weeks and months and years of living had to be condensed down into one moment, and it is today, now.  We as a society, and as individuals, do not seem to be able to closely watch and wait for that which is worth waiting for.  We feverishly work for things we do not need and we vote without thought for those that promise us prosperity without effort.

Everything is based on now. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200. What do you mean you haven't got a date, got a spouse, a house, a baby, and we need to talk to you about those 25 pounds.  Everything is on a time schedule and it's not necessarily ours. Meals are microwaved, we speed date, express wash, Kwik-e-Mart, and you know what? We find that in rushing towards what we're supposed to want, we missed the things that can truly change our lives.

Reset your clock.

Just once, turn off your computer turn off your cell phone, turn off Twitter, and Facebook and clear your calender for a few hours.

Pick up that old firearm that may have been your Dad's, or your Grandfathers and head out into the country.  If you don't hunt, then pick up a camera, a drawing pad and a pencil.  But take some tool that will open up the wilderness to you and go.
Go out into that rapid and fading back country that is retreating as the tide is, walk out into that land that was ours, is ours, field and forest, bayou and orchard, grain and dust, harbor and thicket. Go on out and decide what is important and what is not, among all the flotsam and jetsam in your life, where it is going and how much control you're going to give to others over it.

Go out into that land that still carries the tracks of those that crossed this nation to build, to grow; men, and women and children, bringing with them their tools and trades, goods and gear, by steamer, by wagon wheel by train, by big slow rivers that sometimes revealed no current and sometimes ran backwards, running not to hide, but to dream, all the way to the ocean. It was a land on which a man ate only by the sweat of his brow, the ability to plow a straight furrow or chop down a limb without removing one of his own.  It was a land of milk and honey, steelhead and gold, which offered itself up on rare occasion from the earth as compensation for torn lives and broken bones, payment which neither man nor his government proffered for the weak or the foolish.

Find a spot out in this expanse of history and sit and take it in.

There is so much that might have been, could have been, wrong place, wrong time, so boundless in capacity is man's imagination to burn and scatter away the refuse of probability, leaving only yearning and dreams. No time or space or distance can keep you from that what matters, even if to the world, your dreams of your life is and what kind of world you wish to live in, are little more than transparent scratchings on depthless glass.
I do not regret the days I sat by my brothers bedside as the chemicals went into his body that might or might not kill the cancer that was consuming him with fire that bears no warmth. There was the steady whoosh from machinery in the room, the movement of unsleeping blood, the intake of air. There were so many places I needed to be, so many things I needed to do, but in those hours, those days, being with him was the only thing on my calander.  The room was simple, but its corners and edges held the quiet, complex lives of two very secret people, who long ago escaped from a place that held only pain, there in that season between thunder and any thought of rain, finding their own shelter as we bonded not just as children, but for life.  There in those last days, we had no season, the hospital room alternating day and night in a vacuum in which light was only a hope.

In retrospect, I would not remembere those other things I should have been doing during that time, but I can recall like it was yesterday the sound of his voice there in that room, the feel of his hand holding mine as we said a prayer for more time.

As you sit out there in that countryside, think of these words. Stop and look and breathe. Pick up a discarded piece of wood. Think of what you have, what means the world to you, and what and who you will fight for, as an individual, as part of a family and as a citizen.
Then carve your name on that little piece of wood, carve the name of the one you fight for, or simply carve "Freedom", the letters bearing one clear unfettered voice that sounds out, through the delicate attenuation of your actions, through the ringing bells of your worth, through the tone that is the weight of silent guns - I WAS here, I AM here, there IS still time.

Then go back home to your home and your memories.  A heart shaped locket with a young woman and a man in an airman's uniform, months before war separated them for years. A shirt that could fit a thousand others but which only one wore so long that you will forever know its wearer by the simple feel of the fabric underneath your fingertips, the echo of sandalwood that clings to blue cotton. Go back to your present; a photo on the wall of those who still live to tell you their stories, to hold firm your past, memories that are borne on the air that you still breathe, invisible, yet essential as air itself. Go back to your future. A flag on a wall, one for which your loved ones gave up much of their life for, or even, life itself.

Go back and claim what is there, while there is still time.
 - Brigid