nature

Digging in the dirt

June 9, 2017 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Tucked into a corner of my deepest mind is the image of two tiny feet poking up over a wall of dirt.

Bars of sunlight stretch between the sagging limbs of an ancient pine. My weight is supported by a narrow butt and two small hands sunk deep into a thick blanket of loamy earth. Beside me, the plastic blue blade of a child’s shovel is plunged into a mound of needles and leaves like Excalibur into the stone.

The image is all that remains. Where I happened to be or how old I was or why I had decided to dig a hole simply to sit down in it and gaze out over all creation are questions lost to me. All I can say is that it happened. And if the flavor of that memory is as true as my memory of it, I can also say I enjoyed sitting there a great deal.

It is strange how that image remains so fresh in my mind. So far in my life I have accumulated nearly forty-five years worth of memories, many of which are lost all together and will never be reclaimed. Important events, moments that shaped the person I’ve become, are now nothing more than great gaps of noise to my thinking. And yet the picture of my two feet dangling over the lip of that hole has stuck like a burr in my brain. The fact that it has not budged in all these years leads me to attach some sort of importance to it, as though it means something profound that I am not smart enough or wise enough to understand.

But maybe it’s something much simpler. Maybe that memory remains because I have always been one to crawl around in the dirt and mud.

My people are farmers and mountain folk who would rather be outside than in because outside there is room enough to move and breathe. Here we are raised to believe the ground upon which we tread is the very ground from which we were long ago made, a bit of mud gifted with the touch of the Holy Divine, leaving us to walk upon this earth half fallen and half raised. The caution given me by my parents and grandparents was to never set aside either half of that whole. Lose sight of the holy spark within you, and you’ll become little more than a dumb animal. Forget that you are connected deeply with the wind and rain and mountains, and you’ll live as though all of creation is yours to own rather than borrow for a short time.

That sort of thinking has stuck over the years. Even now, I like my fingers to be stained by earth. I like to dig and plant and find the lonely places. I prefer the feel of grass beneath me to any chair. I would rather lie upon a pallet of boughs than a bed of feathers.

I’ve read that scientists have discovered microbes in soil that serve as an antidepressant on par with drugs such as Prozac.

Natural medicine which enters the body through the nose and the skin. Proof positive that playing outside is good for you.

But it’s more than that. For me, anyway. Getting out in the dirt doesn’t only serve as a reminder that we’re all made of dust and stars. It isn’t merely a link to that long line of kin behind me who made their meager lives by the sweat of their brows and the aches in their backs. What I’m doing in the yard or the garden or the flower beds is acknowledging a part of my own existence that in times past I wanted so desperately to deny, and it is this:

Down in the dirt is where life happens,

right there amongst the mud and muck, and we will never find the means to keep ourselves unsoiled for long. We can try. We can aim to build our lives such that nothing terrible can get through, that we are insulated with stout walls and sturdy roofs that allow no pain to whistle through and no cold to grip us, but in the end this world will always win because it is so big and we are so little.

Best, I think, is to meet this life on its own terms. To get out there and get dirty. Feel the soil on your skin and under your nails and the sweat gathering at your brow. To work and tire and grow sore in your labors knowing all the while that the weeds will return and the grass will grow yet again and it will rain too much or too little but none of it matters in the end, or all of it matters very little.

Because what matters most is not to hide from the world but make yourself present in it, and to dig and dig and dig more.

A song and a prayer

May 26, 2017 by Billy Coffey 13 Comments

bird feeder — image courtesy of photobucket.com

It’s a little late for me to be getting out in the backyard.

A busy day, too much to do. My wife said not to bother but I’m here anyway. I have the hose and two bags of seed plus what’s in an old popcorn tin which came from a place I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter that it’s near dark and the birds are all but asleep. They’ll need to eat tomorrow.

As a child I spent most of the summers weeding my grandmother’s garden and watching her call the birds.

Her beckons were wordless but sung instead, each chorus unique, drawing to the telephone wire which ran parallel to her yard the robins and cardinals first, then the jays and the mockingbirds, the Bobwhites. She called the sparrows and purple martins last. The chirps and whistles from her wrinkled lips came to me as the language of angels. Perhaps it was. My grandmother loved this land and every creature upon it, but the birds presided over a loftier place in her heart. A bird’s wings carry it closer to God than any of us could ever reach. She once told me that when we are wearied and spent and our voices grow small, the birds will carry our prayers to God’s ear.

Though I’ve never quite developed my grandmother’s talent for song, I take great care of the birds in and around our wood.

They are fed and watered without prejudice. I welcome the crows and starlings as much as the mockingbirds and finches. They sing to me and help keep the bugs away. My yard is a happy place. A safe one as well, in spite of the neighbor’s cat.

My habit has always been to check the feeders and and our birdbath every few days and replenish as necessary. That has changed these last months. I’m out here most every day now to top off the thistle seed or sow a little extra food in the grass for the doves and cardinals. I will not let the suet disappear since the woodpeckers prefer it. The same holds for the jays and their sunflower seeds, or the mealworms I set out in a barren spot among the grass for the robins and bluebirds.

Even in the rain, I go. Even on those chilly May mornings when the sun is not yet over the mountains. Even now, when all that is left in the sky are the stars above me. It is no responsibility or needful thing. My birds would get along fine without me. They would have the creek to drink from and the forest across the road from which to seek their shelter and food. They do not depend upon me, though I have come to depend upon them.

My wife watches from the kitchen window. She smiles as I scrub the bath or add a few extra sunflower seeds to the small wooden church attached to an iron shepherd’s crook which serves as one of our feeders. Sometimes she’ll bring out a bowl of the previous night’s popcorn for me to spread, or the heels of a bread loaf. She’ll tap the glass and point at the sparrow near my feet, so accustomed now to my presence that it no longer deems me a threat.

I don’t believe I’ve ever told my wife what Grandma once said about the birds.

She knows the tale of the telephone wire and the way Grandma sang but not about the prayers. It seems a silly thing on the surface. The sort of story any grandparent would tell a child in order that the world be made a more magical place. Of course birds do not carry the wearied prayers of weakened souls to the Lord’s ear. They are creatures, no more. Their songs are merely speech. Their wings may take them skyward, yet they are still earthbound.

I know this.

But I know as well that the woman smiling at me through the window was told not long ago that she is battling a form of leukemia. In ways I’m sure you will understand, that means I am battling it as well. We go through this dark world hand in hand with those we love. Many times, that is the only way we can get from one end of it to the other. We trust and fight and smile and believe. We pray, even in our brokenness and fear. Especially then.

That is why I am out here tonight with my buckets of seed. Why I will be here tomorrow.

Because I must feed my birds well and hope they fly higher.

Cosmic scum like us

February 17, 2017 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

Of the many times I mourn those who live in some city or another, night is when I feel sorry for them most.

I do not speak of crime, or more the threat of it—how so many in those cramped-close jungles of concrete and steel must lock themselves away along with the sun lest they be set upon by evil-doers. I remember taking a trip to Baltimore years ago to visit some of my wife’s kin. The windows of their house looked out upon busy streets filled with litter and exhaust. There wasn’t much to be seen, which was fortunate given I couldn’t see much anyway for the steel bars set over the glass to keep out intruders. I remember wondering how it was that anyone would live in such a way. A comfortable cell is still a cell.

I rather mourn city folk at night for the simple reason they are not afforded the luxury of a view on par with my own. Step out into my yard on any evening when the moon is small and the clouds scattered to the other side of the mountain, you’ll see what I mean. The stars in the Virginia sky are a wonder this time of year, so clear and close you are afraid your breath will chase them away like bugs. Millions of them scattered to all directions, never-ending and straight on to the very curve of the earth, divided overhead by a great milky arm of our galaxy itself. So many stars you cannot fathom to begin counting them all.

I like it out there, looking at them all. Few things in life offer such a perspective.

We humans have been staring at the stars for quite some time and for just that sort of thing—to gain a better view of ourselves and our place. Back when the smartest people around believed Earth occupied the center of the universe, it was fairly easy to see humanity as something special, set apart. Something fashioned by the very hand of God.

Of course the whole center-of-the-universe thing didn’t pan out. Turns out we’re not so special at all, cosmically speaking. The universe is vast and growing more so every second, and just about every part of it we can see is mostly the same. Ours is merely one planet among billions at the far edge of one galaxy among trillions, which over the centuries has changed the way we see ourselves.

Special? Hardly. Needed? Don’t even go there.

Humanity is about as inconsequential as a thing can be. We’re all no more than a happy accident. As the astronomer Carl Sagan laid our situation out, “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star.” Stephen Hawking made it sound even more pessimistic: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.”

Yay us, right?

Call me crazy, but I am of the opinion this sort of thinking has seeped down to infect us all. Doesn’t seem to matter where I go or what I read or who I listen to, it’s all some version of that—nothing really matters because nobody really matters, so screw it because we’re all gonna die and be forgotten anyway. If the politicians or the media or celebrity culture doesn’t ruin us, we’re sure to ruin ourselves.

We’re not all that special.

Then again, maybe we are.

For all the talk about how our planet is so mundane, scientists are discovering the universe itself seems fine-tuned for life. Which is strange, given it seems for now that we’re the only kids on the block. So far the planets discovered beyond our solar system aren’t much Earth-like at all, much less places fit to support the sort of life we know. Intelligence seems a difficult thing to produce in the great beyond of space and time. It takes a lot more than water and oxygen and a few billion years of a stable environment to make even cosmic scum like us.

If that leaves you feeling a little lonely, you’re not alone.

Being special has its drawbacks. Given the size of the universe and the trillions of galaxies holding billions of stars, chances must be pretty good there is at least something out there, or someone. All that wasted space would be a shame otherwise.

But maybe even that doesn’t matter. The universe may be immense and growing, but the speed of light is still fixed. Life could be flourishing in the farthest corners of the cosmos, we’ll never know because we’ll never get there. Even over the span of thousands of years, we’ll be fortunate to visit even the closest stars. Maybe we’ll find someone to talk to. Maybe we’ll have only ourselves.

It seems arrogant on the face of it, believing everything I see in my small patch of Virginia sky exists for us alone.

I’ll be honest and say I have my doubts on that. But I also believe we’re much more than the insignificant inhabitants of an insignificant planet turning around an insignificant star.

We may not be so special in the grand scheme of things, but in our own tiny part of that grand scheme we certainly are.

We are each needed. Special. Wholly unique and so infused with a value far beyond our reckoning.

And maybe for the sake of us all, we should start treating each other like it.

Things wiped clean

January 12, 2017 by Billy Coffey 5 Comments

This weekend brought the first real snow of the year, which makes things feel a little more new than some old crystal ball dropping.

There’s nothing like a fresh coat of white to give you the sense of things wiped clean. God’s way, I suppose, of saying Okay, let’s have a do-over.

My little corner of the world is generally a quiet place.

You get the normal neighborhood sounds of a place set against forest and mountain—kids playing and mommas hollering, dogs that never seem to stop barking, juncos and cardinals singing in the pines and the occasional scream when some poor woman goes out the front door to find a deer standing in her yard. There is a soft heartbeat to country life. It comes steady and sure and you come to stake your existence on it. By those things you know the world is all right and things are mostly as they should be.

But it all goes different once the snow flies.

Get four or five inches on the ground and all that noise stops, even the dogs, leaving everything so quiet and still you can hear your own breaths and feel your own blood moving. As a boy I wanted to be outside as soon as the first flake fell, wanted to tear up every bit of whitened ground. As a man I’m outside just as early, but wanting to keep all that white right where it is for as long as I can. I want to soak in that silence. I want the quiet to move in me.

If I have a single wish for you at the start of this year, it’s just that—for you to get a little quiet inside.

I’ve been gone from this little website for a while—fine, a long while—trying to get a novel finished (and it is, for the most part. Look for Steal Away Home sometime next Christmas and Some Small Magic early this March, which you can pre-order on the cheap right now at Amazon). But in all honesty it wasn’t the book-writing alone that kept me away. Things got a little crazy around election time. Things are still a little crazy, really. It got to the point I couldn’t go anywhere online without having to hear people yell and scream at each other, and it came to the point I needed away from it all for a bit. I have two teenage kids in the house. Yelling and screaming, I hear plenty. Didn’t need any more.

So I sort of checked out from everything for a while. No news, no commentary, and the only books I read were written by people long gone from the world. And you know what I found? Quiet. It was like a January snow, only coming down inside me.

You could say I’m a little worried about the state of things.

I’m not talking about politics or the economy or the social ills that plague us now and forever. I’m talking about us. At some point along the way we’ve forgotten how to talk to treat one another, going from “I’m right and you’re wrong” (which is fine) to “I’m right and you’re an idiot” (which isn’t so much) to “I’m right and you’re evil” (which is . . . well, I don’t know what that is, but it’s bad). We don’t think of one another as souls anymore, but a mass of opinions.

More than anything else right now, it’s quiet we need.

Time to catch our breaths, feel our own hearts beating. Soak in a little bit of silence. There’s time enough to air our grievances. The time to remember we’re all in this together? That might be slipping away.

As for me, there’s till snow on the ground and a path through the woods. I believe I’ll take it and go listening for a bit.

I’ll see you when I’m done.

Trapped between worlds

April 26, 2016 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

For a while all the news was about the woman gone missing in the mountain wilderness two counties over.

It is rough land, beautiful for its remoteness and dangerous for the same. Hundreds have been involved in the search. Pleas have gone out from her family. Her car was found near a trail, abandoned.

Days passed. People hung onto hope, though that hope moved from one buttressed by faith to one guarded by optimism to, finally, a fragile sort of assurance.

Her remains were found last week, deep in the woods. Authorities have now said a suicide note had been found in the car.

It is a sad end to a sad story told too often. Those closest to her are now left to grieve and mourn and somehow move on. No doubt they will be haunted by questions of what sort of despair could wrench itself so deep and thoroughly into her that suicide came to be the only option, and why she felt she could not lean upon those closest for help. The pictures I’ve seen on Facebook show a bright smile and vivacious personality. They serve as a reminder to always approach others with equal measures of grace and kindness, because we may never know the battles they fight or the struggles they face.

Reading about this woman has gotten me thinking about all the others who came before her.

It may surprise you to know just how many people here have committed suicide over the years. It may surprise you more that a great many of them have chosen to take their lives not in their own homes but in the mountains that rise above our peaceful valley. They will often leave without a word or under some small pretext of an errand and drive, making their way along our streets a final time, passing friends and neighbors. They will climb the narrow backroads of the Blue Ridge and find a lonely place to walk, a spot to leave behind a world that somehow left them.

I’m not sure if anyone has ever questioned why it so often happens like that.

Ask the old timers around here, they’ll tell you folk have always gone into the mountains to die. Ask the farmers, they’ll say it’s proof man and woman aren’t so different than the animals, who themselves oftentimes sneak away to lonely places so they may breathe their last.

But I’ve always thought a deeper reason lay inside the broken hearts and exhausted souls of those who wish their living done.

To me it is as if they seek the bosom of the woods because the woods always embrace, and each step taken deeper into those ridges and hollers is a step away from their trials. And perhaps it is that they climb these mountains so they may glimpse a heaven they never imagined or never believed.

They say our mountains are filled with the spirits of those trapped between worlds, whose deaths were lonely and violent. Sometimes I believe those stories. But I pray that tired woman who passed on among the oaks and mountain streams has found a peace she somehow came to lack, just as I pray a bit of her remains behind to aid those who come after. To take their hands and gaze into their eyes and ask that they turn back.

For it is a hard world that holds us all, and broken, but there is beauty in the cracks.

Back in the Summer of 69

September 29, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

That dry season I told you about a couple weeks back is nothing more than a memory now. It’s been raining here for so long that people can’t even remember when it began. Days upon days, one long and soggy line. The creeks are full and the grass is back; everywhere you walk makes a squishy sound. No downpours, at least not yet. Just that steady sort of falling water that starts out making you feel comfortable and ends up sinking into your bones. The ground is saturated now. I hear more rain is coming, the kind that keeps interrupting the radio with screeches and buzzes and warnings of rising rivers and washed out back roads.

Whenever these parts are hit with this much rain, invariably someone will mention 1969. Usually it’s an old timer, like the ones who hang around down at the hardware store or on the benches outside the 7-11. You’ll say hello to them and keep going for your new hammer or a bottle of Mountain Dew, and they’ll draw you in. Old timers like that have all the hours in the world to talk. And since so many of them have spent their lives coaxing food from the black dirt on their farms, weather is their specialty. Weather and memory.

“You think it’s wet,” they’ll say, “you don’t know nothing. You shoulda been here in ’69.”

I wasn’t, of course. I missed what happened here back then by three years. But I know many who were not so fortunate.

In August of that year, a tropical wave formed off the coast of Africa and swept westward along the 15th parallel into the lesser Antilles, where it became a hurricane south of Cuba. The National Weather Service named it Camille. It made landfall on August 18, crushing Waveland, Mississippi. From there Camille tracked north, through Tennessee and Kentucky. Then it veered hard right through West Virginia and into the Appalachias, where it ran smack into Virginia’s Blue Ridge.

That was August 19, 1969.

Nelson County, just over the mountain from us, suffered worst. The rains came so hard and so utterly fast that it defied human reason and nearly touched the Divine. Some even called it judgment for a people who had strayed from the Lord. Houses were swept away, cars tossed like playthings. Whole towns and families lost, disappeared. The very contours of the mountains were shifted and changed by walls of mud. In the end, twenty-seven inches of rain fell in less than five hours. The National Weather Service stated it was “the maximum rainfall which meteorologists compute to be theoretically possible.”

One hundred and twenty-three people perished. Many more were never found. To this day, their bones lie somewhere among the fields and vales. It was estimated that 1 percent of the county’s population were killed that day. Most perished not by drowning but by blunt force trauma, the water throwing them into the nearest immovable object.

The destruction and loss of life was so complete that Camille was stricken from any further use as the name for a hurricane. People here won’t even utter the word. It’s always The Flood. Nothing more than that needs saying.

Then again, maybe I’ll say a little. Because what gets added on the end of that nightmare across the mountain was the grace and kindness shown after. The government appeared en masse in the days and weeks following the storm to clean up and rebuild, but it was the untold thousands of volunteers who did most—the farmers and mountain folk and more church groups than anyone could count, people who knew those mountaintops and hollers well. My daddy and granddaddy were among them. They moved slow through all those shattered homes and marked the ones that had become tombs. They carried pistols in their hands because of the million snakes that had been washed from their dens.

For years Grandma kept a picture she’d taken of the sky on the day the Camille left on her mantle. It was black and white instead of color, but you could still see how black the sky looked, how evil. But you could also see as plain as day how in the middle of that picture the clouds had parted in the perfect shape of an angel to let the sunshine through.

It wasn’t the first time tragedy and hardship had visited this part of our world. It won’t be the last. But if there is any comfort to be had in such times, it is the same comfort that was found in the late summer of ’69—God is still there, still watching, and there will always be good people who will rush to your aid and help you repair what life has born asunder.