Erbie, Arkansas

Erbie

    Ian,

     The crows are talking to each other in the canopy of trees here at the cabin. They sound like a pack of dogs, what are they saying? Each has a different voice, a different accent...I never noticed that before. One's voice low and gravely, another with a quivering timber; some screaming and some murmuring. Are they just making it known that these are their woods or trying to solve some family argument? Is it a family at all?

So much in this world I do not

understand, things living and playing at the drama of life. 

A damselfly nymph,

Daisies,

And a tortoise wearing a horribly cracked, yet healed shell.

I envy the healing.

A whole flutter of blue Tiger Swallowtail butterflies, delicate and shockingly perfect

But oddly devouring mud......

     I saw a shell of a craw fish and looked away, thinking it dead (you know I look away from death any time I am able); but then on closer inspection found it was just the discarded shell. I felt relief imagining the newer, more colorful and brighter fellow that burst forth. It made me think of you, Biggun. I put out bird seed in front of the cabin and this morning the black wax sunflower seeds and peanuts were gone, but tiny seeds remained. This means the crows and squirrels have been here first. It is another story of the woods.

     Giant boulders along the creek in a narrow gap that I found were cloaked in lacy blue lichen and thick fuzzy moss-occasional golden blooms at the end of a single hair sticking out of their eye brows. Some of these monsters were weeping moisture. Not dripping over the top or oozing from underneath; but moisture perspiring from within the rocks themselves, like the Russian Orthodox Icon weeping myrrh at the monastery in Blanco. Impossible but true, Ian.

     Sitting with Debbie in the cold springs, I look up into the canopy above us, and then to the waterfalls, water shoots....and down to the silt and minnows and water bugs below and I think of you,

as I always do when beauty finds me. And again in my head I hear murmuring (not unlike the crows); the whisper.....

I wish I could tell you with my human voice, instead of my crow-muttering, that everything I see and feel and do and wonder about...

dream and imagine and puzzle about.....

would be lovelier with you in my woods and by my side.

                                                                                                                         Love, Mom