Omnibus (Only Mostly Not)

June 27

Lovelies.

Hmm... at work, when we do an ad that has a random assortment of products on it, with nothing among them in common, we call it an "Omnibus" ad. So that’s what kind of entry this is going to be-- omnibus. Not because I have nothing to say, and am therefore intending to ramble, but because I have lots to say, and want to say most of it.

First, congratulations to Karen and Par (with an umlaut, of course) on their impending parenthood! You guys’ll be the greatest mom and dad in the history of the situation!

Yes, yes, this past weekend I went to the Heifer Project International’s ranch in Arkansas, to visit an old girlfriend-- it was a complicated and fascinating and ultimately beneficial experience, full of stars and water and holly groves and ponds and weed gardens and goats and All Flying Up In The Air To-And-Fro-- but I’ll write about Arkansas in the next day or two. First, I want to catch up on all the too-many things I didn’t get to write about before I left on my trip.

When I was younger (like, ten and thereabouts), I noticed that older people were always wanting to zoom off across the world to see this pyramid or that city or some street or square or monument or landform or another. I could appreciate that-- it’s a big and fascinating world-- but I also noticed that those people didn’t seem to pay much attention to their own back yards. They could have a colony of ants back there, or a pile of old bricks that could have been anything before getting smashed up, or trees so thoroughly branched that nailed-on ladders and platforms would have been redundant, or secret groves, or streams, or places where sunlight hadn’t come in so long that the leaves on the ground were whitened, or palaces made of twining wild grape vines, or bits of tin and chain and scrap lumber just waiting to be transformed into a sailing ship or a bike ramp. Why did those people want to run off to Tibet (say) or Paris (for example) or even Upper Volta (well, not really), when they didn’t even appreciate what they had? I pitied them, I have to say, in a very supercilious ten-year-oldish way, and I had many a fine romp and adventure in the vast unexplored territory of my backyard and environs.

Then, at some point, I grew up (some, at least). I started wanting to go to Florence and Bombay and other such places. Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to go to those places, let me be most clear on that. I still want to go to them, and to other places as well. But: I stopped paying attention to my nearer environment. I moved here to Boone five years ago, and I hardly explored a bit. People had to drag me away from my well-tread paths to and from class and work and home, to show me waterfalls and coffee shops and bookstores. I became a bit more adventurous, but not much... And, for the past year, I’ve lived a couple of miles outside of town, with a front-porch view of mountains and horses and a real yard. Now, maybe it came from four years of dorm-and-apartment living, with only asphalt as a back yard, or maybe it came from my only-recently-dissipating tropistic state, or maybe it’s just some sort of mental calcification (is that a word?), but I never really looked around my yard. I mean, it’s not that big a yard, and there were parts I’d never ventured into.

Last weekend I was doing the dishes, and I looked outside the kitchen window and saw a chipmunk digging a hole. On a whim, I went out the backdoor to look at him dig. There was a big thundercrack, and the chipmunk scampered away. I went to look at the hole-- and found a whole underground city of burrows, the ground humped up to indicated the presence of those secret tunnels.

Seeing that woke something up in me. I walked around the yard. I went over by the apple tree and realized there’s a whole rabbit warren under there. I see the bunnies in the morning sometimes, when I rush to work, but there’s a settlement of them! I looked into the little shed attached to the property and found pale spiders, chains, unidentifiable junk-- a treasure-trove, and my 10-year-old self crowed in delight.

There are trees in my yard, trees with spreading branches I’d never crawled beneath; stone slabs poking from the dirt that I’d never wondered about (a temple floor? entrance to a hidden tomb?); a clothesline pole I’d never swung from. I was amazed.

Then it began to rain, and I stood beneath a tree and watched, and listened. Eventually the rain poured so hard and cold that I was driven inside, but only long enough to get an umbrella, and then I came back out, walking and splashing. I’d never seen that sudden river of rainwater pouring down the asphalt drive, rocks making beautiful waterfalls, and little green apples caught in the torrent and rolling down. I laughed; I smiled; I felt so good.

How much have I missed?

And then the sun came out, and everything glistened, and steam rose from the roof and the road. Light caught wet spiderwebs, and that’s a beautiful thing to see.

So why did I forget? Why don’t I drink coffee and watch the rabbits? Why did I never walk around my own yard?

I hope I remember. I don’t want to grow up so much that I forget about birds and rabbits and the way light comes through spring leaves.

How can I write stories designed to stir the sense of wonder when my own sense of wonder has become so dulled?

I’m better for the moment. Here’s hoping it lasts.

Hmm. I’d rather intended to write about some other things... but I got sort of long-worded on that last part. So this entry isn’t really much of an omnibus after all. Ah, well. I’ll come to those other things later, then.