Reflections on an Anniversary

Forty six years -- where does the time go?

Are we even still the same people who made those ambitious vows back in 1963?

We've been together far longer than we were apart . . . it's hard to remember a time when we weren't a couple. After so many years, we finish each other's sentences . . . answer unasked questions . . . and very often seem to read each other's thoughts. Almost as if we were mirror images of one another.

But it's just possible that we're still together, against the odds ("I give this marriage five years," said my mother back in '64) because we've learned to give each other space to follow our own particular dreams -- freedom to fly.

And the sure and certain knowledge of a familiar place to land.

Two Sides of the Coin

Yesterday afternoon I attended a memorial service for my friend Eileen. As I drove home, I thought about the curious balance of life and death.

I had just said goodbye to an old friend, departed after a long and well-lived life; I'd just received pictures of my new nephew -Asher Andrew Walton, new born Friday, with all of life awaiting him.

Sunrise . . . sunset -- they follow one another in a never-ending round.

And how perfect that the Great Blue Heron -- my personal symbol of eternity (he lurks in the river of Elizabeth's world in the present and the past) -- should be waiting for me when I crossed the river on my way back home. . .

Hello and Goodbye.
Go in peace; Arrive in joy.

The Heron at the River

A glorious inch of rain fell yesterday and this morning the river was hurrying along as a white-water river should. I stopped on the bridge (lack of traffic is one of the delights of country life) to try for a picture of the Great Blue Heron who's almost always there.

Little Sylvie sees him in Signs in the Blood. "Standin in the water below me was a great tall gray bird with a long sharp beak. He was as stiff as if he was carved out of wood, just a-watchin the water at his feet. Then all to once he darted out that cruel beak and I seen a flash of silver as he brung up a fish and swallered it."

And in the same book, Elizabeth mentions taking a picture of the heron that haunts the river's shallows. (I hope her camera had a telephoto lens -- mine, obviously, does not.) I think I used the heron in another book but can't find any references just now and really need to get back to that proof reading. I do know that he's back in book four!

More and more I find that I'm trying, in these Marshall County books, to show certain continuities -- the persistence of memory, of families and place, even of good and evil. Maybe the heron will become a sort of leitmotif -- if that isn't too high-falutin' a concept for a paperback writer like me.