Eugene

I couldn’t quite find the words as we sat together around the table, looking hopefully into our kins’ eyes. So differently our tongues curl. Our gardens keep asynchronous calendars. Our suns rise and fall several degrees apart on the Earth’s dial. We conversed in search of the shared story.

I could not find the words just then beyond how he told me to begin: a tract of land hosting an old farmhouse, a railroad bridge, a collection of rickety sheds, a shallow pond, a shaded stand of perennials, a gravel road past a planted field leading toward a marsh. Start there, he said…

So, our story begins with a quiet boy kicking around a stone on his way to look for a snake in the marsh. A summer day with a clear blue sky. He stares into the brackish water waiting for a small moment. The only sounds: the buzzing a fly over his shoulder and the faint roar of a freight train rumbling away into others’ stories.

Despite the chores awaiting him in the small barn, the boy sits patiently in the searing heat, waiting for just one snake to show itself between the marsh grasses. He notices, just then, his thoughts. He notices himself noticing his own thoughts. Awareness, he reflects, of his very own patience and curiosity is a delightful trick!

Although the snake does not appear this particular time, on this certain hot summer day, in this corner of the marsh just past the old junk pile, the boy has achieved his purpose. It happened in a minute. It was after the train had pulled its weight beyond all detection, and after the fly had flown off in search of a better target. A silence wrapped around the boy’s shoulders, cupped his impish ears, blanketed the surrounding marsh, and stilled the high birch branches. That silence lingered only a few perfect seconds, and there the boy reached his life’s purpose.

Observing his observing, he rested his gaze beneath those heavy lids upon the water’s surface. This was his favorite way to see the sky—a muted blue-grey painted against liquid glass.

Yes, this day was a good day, the boy watched himself thinking. Just as well, he reasoned, that the snake found other ways to pass the time. Yes, today was a good day. Too hot even for that fly after all. Or for the snake, or a breeze, or those birch trees. Too hot for the corn. Profound, gratifying silence the boy had found. A worthy purpose any day.

There in that silence the boy focused on a patch of watery sky below. And he perceived a broad future. Within those mere seconds he felt himself plunging down into that deep sky and soaring above great oceans. The old farmhouse transformed into cities and cathedrals. Trees and plants and birds recounted tales of all that was yet to come. Of war and peace. Of girls and boys. Of great spectacles and of small joys. Of lies and of legends. Of becoming and building. Of loves, regrets, and stories well told.

He observed himself observe that sacred moment dissipate into the heat. And then, he forgot. Yet, those promises of tomorrow seeped into the marsh to feed the wild grasses that whispered into the night.

The boy rose and dropped a stone into the water to scare off the stupid snake who had been there watching. He wiped his brow with a dusty sleeve and skipped away to his chores.

In the evening, as the boy slept sweetly in the farmhouse next to his two small brothers, the Moon surveyed the marsh. Her gentle beams reached down into the mud feeling for some legacy. There, in the gooey bottom, She discovered a life well to be lived. The boy returned again. Noticed again. Forgot again. And again, and again. But he remembered having learned the telling of a story.

I couldn’t quite find the words as we hurried to cram a lifetime into one meal. Not until sitting still while gliding above the clouds could I see—and see myself seeing—into that summer day long past.

The boy became a storyteller, an impish pastime taught to himself while all alone by the marsh. And here I write just as he tells it to me now while we soar over the ocean into the northeast. Back to a land of old farmhouses, and small fields, and gravely roads, and snakes that stay hidden. And the boy tells me now to say to you, “A day is good an long, and then you simply rest.”