June Nineteenth

 

Juneteenth, Wednesday 19 June 2024 and my third day into the Wilderness, trekking on to let the desert find me. Books to read, magazines to read, hot & black to sip and cheese to nibble - - this morning on crackers, Sweet Grass Dairy's Green Hill, a soft ripened double cream cow's milk cheese. 

But the desert: I'm 19 minutes into an online 3 hour and 41 minute read through the Book of Enoch. If you've not read Enoch, give it a miss, take a pass and take credit for Uncle Bubba having read it in your name, as the Pharisees made a scrupulousness of keeping every aspect and facet of the Law so that other Jews might go about their daily lives.

Trust me, you do not need to read Enoch, I've got your back, using my desert space and Time to cover you. It's not likely to be one of the questions anyway. 

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Anu Garg's word for today is balderdash, probably not much use for it; but his thought for today bears minding, as it pretty much says it all:

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. -Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (19 Jun 1623-1662)

Said by a friend years ago in another way, nothing is more ominous than a Born Again Christian rising from his knees and going forth to do the will of God. 

Enoch was/is not Christian, but ...

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Interlude: usual four o'clock rising, now a nap for a Time and half a Time.

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Outside on 7H porch hearing waves lap ashore seven levels down. A wading bird flies away, emitting its ungodly shriek that calls forth לִּילִ֔ית the night hag Lilith of Isaiah 34:14. Years ago at The Old Place, before air conditioning, one dark night we were awakened to a loud, threatening, grawking squawk just outside our upstairs bedroom window, the attack cry of some evil creature about to burst through the old screen. With a flashlight I soon spied a wading bird roosting high in the cedar tree there. 

For years I thought of The Old Place as Cedar Hill because of all the cedar trees on the property and up close to the house. A storm-ravished one that formed My Laughing Place down on the beach. One near the road to the left of my grandfather's concrete pathway, that my parents told me was planted by my father and John Carroll when he was a little boy. Another old cedar to the right of the path, bent over so ominously that I put a 4x4 under it to keep it from falling - - that I had a photo from, it would have been 1916 I reckon, of my father sitting there at the tree trunk's fork, dressed in his Little Lord Fauntleroy best, he was five years old. In the high part of the front yard, to the right looking out from the house, a cedar tree that an early hurricane took down, where I later transplanted a large fig tree. Just outside the dining room, a large cedar tree that my father had taken down because it was too near the house. The three or four cedar trees on the east side of the house, on Calhoun Avenue; one of which, also, my parents told me that John Carroll and my father had planted, those two trees being especially cherished by all off us until storms had their way. 

The last one I remember was on the back edge of the property, a huge cedar with enormous split off branch that I had cabled by a professional tree company about twenty-five years ago, to keep the split from falling on Malinda's house. That particular tree, one day I was sitting out on the back porch at The Old Place and saw a huge explosion of what I first thought was dense smoke blow out from the tree's greenery. As I watched it, I realized that it was a burst of pollen.

All those cedar trees are gone, not one left. Gone along with the azaleas that Mama and Anderson transplanted from the Massalina Drive house in the early 1960s, azaleas that I had helped Mama plant those years that I came home from Cove School to help her with yard work; gone the camellias that Mama grafted and, again, moved from our house in the Cove. Gone the fig trees that, on July mornings when we were home on leave my Navy years, I used to circle, walking round and round picking and eating ripe figs for early breakfast. 

No, though, I'd not go back today, the memories hold me! For that beloved century old house, I needed an electrician on call, a roofer on call, a plumber on call, an exterminator scheduled first weekly then monthly. When the front porch started sagging I had to summon my building contractor on call to reinforce the work that my grandfather's fishermen had first constructed back in 1911,12 - - that was the story of when the house was built. 

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That isn't where I was going before my two hour nap. Where to then? Something about Enoch as I recall? Late morning now, 85°F 65% humidity, and a news flash that Tropical Storm Alberto has formed in the Gulf of Mexico. 

RSF&PTL

T88&c