Ken Slone

How much a part of nature we are on this new snow-fallen January morning
In our mountains I wonder, for that determination is not left up to us.
Scarlet cardinals that cross our paths are important to our non-eternal world.
If not for sudden bursts of red crossing our paths
Or plump examples sitting on our evergreen rhododendrons or males and females walking across our deck in search of cat food,

Our limited lives would be less rich. If not for
Cooing mourning doves that squeak as they make their take—offs for flight
Or the silly-child cries of woodpeckers in
Flight or the juicy squawk of squirrels
Who by all rights should be encased in wintertime tree-trunk hibernation, our natural world would be lacking—sorely so as they say.

Yesterday, I sat outside in sub-freezing temperatures
Immersed in the warmth of our hot tub and stared at sky with a depth of blue
Only seeable in mountains. My stream descended,
Gently playing the harp or so it seemed to me.
Thankfully the volume was soft; it did not hide life sounds to create the false belief that I could be alone

Where no one wants to be—really.
Earlier in the month we walked the Dewey Dam
Near the office of a Corps worker who died this winter too soon.
Stonney always had time to stop and talk to us.
Once he spoke of his retirement. He knew how much his family needed; he knew the age and year that would never come for him.

Before and after he died, a rainbow appeared over the mountain
In a sky place he would have been able to have seen out his office window.
We wondered why Corps flags were not at half-mast to honor him, but when we saw the rainbows,
Knew they were the more appropriate tribute.
Whether our nature notices us at all, we wonder sometimes, but his nature noticed him,

And it missed him.
For days after he died,
Pigeons that roost under the dam bridge
Flew as a flock in patterns as if they were gulls
Marking the symbol of eternity.

Don’t know how it is where you are,
Been places east of here and know the situation seems the same,
But Daylight Savings Time has been long obliterated,
And once again this December we have been left with
Fourteen hours of darkness.

Darkness affects us all differently of course.
One Christmas all I wanted was one
Of those lights from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue
So brilliant that if you stare,
You will be cured of seasonal affective disorder completely.

I suppose that lamp is all that has prevented
Me from disappearing completely,
For I suspect not everyone here subscribes to the catalogue
Of a one-store outfit in Manhattan, and Wal-Mart does not carry Verilux lamps,
And most everyone here has disappeared—into hibernation I suppose.

In my childhood we had no 24-hour weather channel meteorologists standing in fear in front of green screens,
Warning us to hide indoors because weather was coming.
One Christmas I got a magenta drag bike
With banana seat, wide white-walled knobby tread tires, and a chrome wheelie bar.
(Saw one on display in one of the Smithsonians eleven years ago, not in magenta—special Western Auto color, you know.)

So sans warning I dressed for winter, went out and rode my bike
In snow.  Cold and snow would never prevent me,
But that damn darkness.  It was always a threat because Mom rightfully believed it unsafe
To ride along Route 201 at night.
Not even Mr. Tony’s advice to wear white would have consoled her.

Tony Kornheiser is closer to my age; he was battling his own Long Island darkness at the time.
From what I know of east-coast Decembers spent on the South Carolina coast,
His darkness came on him earlier and stayed not as late in mornings, but
From what I suspect of the universe,
His fourteen hours and mine were/are the same in duration.

We each day walk in the park,
Wanting wide open sky and sunshine.
In other months we were not alone.
Now even fishermen stay inside like hibernated squirrels,
So we walk unaccompanied in silence except when our heron squall like infants.

The playground stays empty of children
Who sit alone in darkness in front of bright television screens
Sometimes watching weathermen
Who are not very good at predictions, but
Who are expedient threateners of the terror of wind chill, and black ice, and darkness.

Been in the sky, busy staring at sunsets and doing a lot of writing, playing

Guitar, finding new chords, even learned a new song, “Four and Twenty” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.

Been mostly too busy to look down from way up here; the

Sky is interesting and art like in itself—

Morning colors that fade to blue and reflect on the ocean gray greening it to blue.

Saw streams/streaks of heavenly light and even a round rainbow, for the first time

One evening when the sun set twice—

Once descending into a cloud bank,

Then reappearing beneath the cloud still above the horizon

Where it set again, this time with twelve-hour finality.

Pelicans in flocks glide just above me.  I wave but go unnoticed.

Living in the sky for nearly a month now has caused me to wonder

Why I ever considered myself important enough to be observed from

Heaven by those many loved ones of mine there.

Oh, they may have looked down once or twice when first they arrived

As did I here in the sky,

But beauty lifts the eye; it does not lower.

Like me, I’m betting the longer loved ones are in Heaven

The fewer spells they spend

Spying earth.

Our guardian angels stay closer,

Sooner, after their Heavenly arrival.

Their lives “simply ceased,”

They find in Heaven, as I have found here in the sky,

Fresh art by the moment evolving into fresher and no longer the need to look down.

And so it was I came to travel south to another
World of Grace and light
To sit on my eleventh floor balcony
And spy a walker
Deliberate of pace who seemed too alone to me

Here nestled with visiting family in my second home chosen to spend thirty-one days
Closing the gate on a long, hard, wet mountain winter.
She wore black trousers that even from this distance and
Height I knew were too big for her waist—the way she stopped to hike them up with both hands,
Then restarted her walk, south on the shoreline,

Unhurried, she walked a crooked path. Oh, she was careful to avoid the encroaching
Surf as she wore shoes she was not ready to discard
Due to incrimination of sand and salt water.
I did not see her lift her face to watch flock after flock of
Pelicans headed north and over sand not sea, fleeing the storm I saw on radar moving south to north.

The storm she is headed for is of no concern to her.
She has her so-far-dry dawning.
She walks on the water as it seems to me,
Because I am looking not at her shoes but at her face as I imagine it;
The way she ambles tells me she is inspired by the waves into thought—maybe tears.

Perhaps she is trying to make up her mind,
Being at one of those places in life when decision is required.
Maybe she has lost her sunshine and has come here to the
Coast to recover someone lost
Even though she knows for him there is no returning.

I think she may be like me the first time I came here.  She may be deciding this will always be her second home
And that some day when she can afford to retire,
Having lost her love for money,
She too will settle here to close a difficult winter with a month of sky, sunshine, and slow walks
Just out of the way of water.

Next anniversary will be our thirty-fifth.
And what I always told my children,
Today still rings true for you and me.
Never stop searching
For kindness in one another.

It’s what Mr. Saunders called to tell me
On the day my father entered River View,
Even in her Alzheimer’s haze,
Mr. Saunder’s wife had,
“Never stopped responding to kindness.”

Life may be circular,
But to mortals appears
More like a rainbow arc of kindness
That is at its apex during life’s troubles
But clearly present at a relationship’s inception unto death….

The kindness I saw in your eyes in 1971,
I still see there today.
And our actions through the years
More than prove
That what I saw was both reality and reflection.

Cardinals are everywhere this mountain spring.
Their colors appearing suddenly against a sea of emerald green.
We see them most often in flight of course,
But here in our hollow they feel safe enough
To walk the grass and moss in pairs.

Yesterday I saw a couple.
He had found a worm in the rain dampened soil,
Had beaked it but had not eaten it.
Turning to his mate and like a mother bird feeding her young,
He offered it to her.

Thanks for cutting my steak for me last time
And for all those other small kindnesses
That helped build the arc
We sometimes see
After a rain.

The way the light illuminates this room is from you, Mom.
Your selection of the lamp I inherited was always
Intended to cast these green, amber, and magenta shades into this room.
You must have known this all along,
For this lamp is the only piece you designated for me to inherit after your death.

In your home it sat atop a table
Strategically placed in front
Of the only picture window
Your houses ever knew
Though you were enamored with picture windows all your life.

At night from the road that passed in front of your home
The four brightly lit globes in the shape and spacing of one huge four flowered plant
Must have been breathtaking.
I wonder if you ever saw the lamp that way
Or if its colors were only visible to you within.

Today, twenty-one years after your passing,
The old lamp’s colors are softly pleasing in this room
Though it sits not in front of our tall windows.
(I inherited your love of big windows and the lamp.)
Instead it sits against a wall and work of art

Titled “On the Line” in which a pinwheel-
Pattern quilt hangs on a clothesline
Reminding me of your love of the smell of laundry on the line
And your love of quilting
And of me.

The green globe is closest to the painting
And perfectly accents the season, spring.
The other two globes glow amber and magenta:
Amber like the dominate color of the light in my favorite Hill photo “Realm of Angels,”
And magenta like the color of my first new bicycle.

One globe remains dark, a testament to life’s imperfections
And a reminder that one day our light will darken in death.
You picked out this lamp the way we all make our choices
For reasons we only think we know.
My lamp is a symbol of your memory, Mom.

My dog is worried about me.
I may need to retire.
Cardinals cross my path to slow my pace. I may need….
Two woodys in my back woods tell me in Morris they knew my mother.
I may be in need of retirement.

At River and at Mountian View I saw old folks on Alzheimer’s meds
Who were wandering, searching for their peace.
I may need to retire to find my own
On water or in woods
At the Gorge or on Laurel Branch Trail at the Breaks.

Outside the Johnson Building on my campus
I talked one last time to Doc Campbell.
He said, “Kenny, retire the first chance you get.
I wish I had; now my cancer will take me
Before I have the chance to travel.”

A call from a former student, a preacher then as now,
And words that were not sufficient for communicating
The fact that Bobby had been doctor told
To make ready for his journey
Home.

“Be still and know that I am God,”
My favorite Bible verse,
Came to mind.
Stillness and teaching so many who are not ready to receive
Do not hold hands down the path to peace.

My dog is looking up at me with those sad, brown eyes of his,
Telling me he is worried.
A squirrel just “flew” between two trees, reminding me of my youth.
I should pay attention to the signs.
I may need to retire.