Bob Gray

Overeager and anxious to get a jump on the season, I planted a couple of my rows of corn way off line so their crooked ranks stagger, loop from left to right and back again like happy, wandering, drunks.

As the grass grows and the poppies blossom, the lessons of history go begging as we blithely repeat our deadly mistakes time-after-time all down the days, all down the years.

It’s well-known Spring is the least of our seasons. The peepers and their tentative brook are at once the least but surest of all Spring’s messengers.

A fine young gentleman from Housatonic, Garrett Norton, 21, died tragically in an automobile accident. Worse still is the coverage of the accident by the local newspaper. Most difficult for me, and I hope for all of you, are the gratuitous pictures published under the guise of being part of a news story.

It’s a simple thing to become desperate and exasperated with the world and its people and events which I have no power to change. Working outside in the waking world gives me time to contemplate, to realize I’m not charged with changing the world. The best I can do is examine my own life in peaceful, quiet, and solitary labor.

As the TV anchors and the experts droned on and on with inane commentary, I wondered how many children in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya were being rendered homeless? How many children died of hunger, disease, and exposure while we got to know way too much about the 150 well-fed, adequately clothed, and financially secure people?

Each passing aisle of graves is a page in a book. It might read like a mystery to people from away, but for someone who can read each page, there is history and memory, melancholy and remembrance.

I wouldn’t think piblotoq would be too difficult to diagnose in the Arctic, but given this winter extreme cold and dark I think I’ve had a couple of symptoms of the stuff myself.

Winter came in shyly In December, masquerading as delicate snowflakes, but now cabins us in, piles up around our foundation, hangs over us as icicles, dripping melt one minute, a glittering sword to land on our heads the next.

False contrition begs the question “Are we on our best behavior because of goodness part of our fiber? Or are we good because we fear being caught and punished?”

I am not a man of great or constant religious belief, though I wish at times I were. But I do have faith in the proven dogma of the seasons, of sun and rain and warm and cold passing and coming around again and again over long, slow time.

Maybe a pyre would be a better word for my annual pile gladly given over to the flames. Much of what was burned were mistakes. Not mistakes I’d made by tossing the stuff on the fire but mistakes in judgment, the detritus of dreams I chased too far for too long.

By my lights, the clear-cutters bought some lake-side property and, regardless of any consequences or precautions against polluting a water supply, decided it was their right actually to see the lake.

Some tribes believed that wolves were men’s souls. Imagine them, circled around a campfire, startled, doubtful, apprehensive, and thrilled at the same time as they listened to the pack abroad in the January moonlight.

In young adulthood, you imbibed your way past any sense or inhibition, danced yourself into a good lather, and got to kiss your neighbor’s wife at midnight.

I just can’t stop thinking of all the good which might be done with simply the eight million dollars this country spends each day for airstrikes against the Islamic State in a “war” which will never be “won” despite all the bombs and the billions of dollars we drop into that black hole.