Down to final hours, we will be here overnight then get up Monday morning, load car, make a stop downtown, head to Panama City. Here, I have either felt or truly  been back home these ten days, concentrated psychic existential trauma, and’ve been examining myself regarding what’s good and what's other.  Emotionally, physically, spiritually far beyond “old home week.” With exceptions now gone who were beloved favorites those years, people look and interact the same, same smiles, same sound of voices, same warmness. In church. Knocking on the rectory door. In the sacristy visiting, vesting, prepping for service. During worship, same feel, same room, same furniture, same chair, same me, same pulpit, different Altar, same congregation with mostly other faces, 15 at eight am, 61 at ten-thirty. Sitting here by the window at the kitchen table, rectory, Trinity Episcopal Church, Apalachicola. What happened? When, Lord? Sitting up in the bed and looking down the ha...

There is Good News today. Being as I’m not your rector, I’ll not preach it at you, but I’ll share some of it, and if you are patient with me we may both enjoy and learn something. You may be seated. Romans 1: Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, who was descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God according to the Holy Spirit by his resurrection from the dead - - To God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” ++++++++++++++++++++++ From Exodus 14: “The angel of God who was going before the Israelite army moved and  went behind them; and the pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and took its place behind them. It came between the army of Egypt and the army of Israel.”  So in retrospect, Pharaoh was right, wasn’t he, to fear that Hebrew boy babies would grow up into an army overthrowing their Egyptian masters, and now it has happened.  As for angel...

Driving along the Gulf of Mexico where US98 crosses from Bay County into Gulf County is also the Time change from central to eastern Time. A day or two, and one acclimates to Time being an hour earlier here. The sun doesn’t realize it though, which means that Apalachicola stays dark later in Time. But then Time is a human concept and artificial construct anyway as earth, solar system and our galaxy race into the darkness. And that eighty-two years seems long to me is a joke to whatever is real out there, if anything is. Good News today as the Red Sea rushes in to swallow up the bad guys, horse and rider thrown into the sea. And a stern lesson on mercy in Jesus’ Parable of the Unforgiving Slave (δοῦλος, slave, not merely a servant, but a male slave). Slave is unimaginable to us but was simply part of the socioeconomic political structure to Jesus, who was part of the world as he knew it. Anyway, there we go, Sunday morning. News overnight was Gina slowly continuing to improve, ho...

Twenty-five or thirty years ago a parishioner friend out for a walk was mugged, roughed up and robbed at gunpoint with one of the accomplices shrieking, “shoot him, shoot him,” but I never felt uneasy or threatened here even out after dark, at least in this quarter of town. Memory escapes me, but Dean may foolishly have been “over on the Hill” at the time. I feel safe, but it nevertheless seems wise to be alert and cautious.  There was a long era when Trinity Church was open round the clock for visitors and people to come in for peace, to pray, meditate, sit, rest. And when old-time residents who were my parishioners thought nothing of driving off to see relatives in Ohio for a couple of weeks, leaving their house on Avenue E Chestnut Street US98 unlocked and the back door standing open. Still pitch black out when I went into the church just now, I used a key to enter through the sacristy; but walking to the front to fetch a bulletin for tomorrow, I glanced over to the mai...

Never my style to say “never” or to begin with “so” but so I’m up early again, here in Apalachicola. It’s three o’clock in the morning in Panama City, where at five o’clock my sister will be awakened and shuttled off to final prep for open heart surgery beginning about six or six-thirty. BTDT. Linda and I will soon close and lock the Rectory door and drive to PC to be with family, my brother and more, fingers crossed and prayer hanging over. BTDT and confident. We’ll return to Apalachicola later today for a service tomorrow morning and two services Sunday morning. So what else is new? Yesterday a dozen oysters steamed three-to-five seconds and served cold to me while a Hole in the Wall full of total strangers laughed at my sham of “steamed” and raucously sang “Happy birthday.” Early afternoon up Scipio Creek to the YellowFly Ranch for a long-missed visit. Last evening, conversation, drinks and dinner gathering several special people from our years of life here. Never senti...

Blaise at five o’clock Thursday morning, Blaise Harris, who acknowledges me as having a soft voice and a hand to scratch and pet, but shows her true love lapsitting and lapnapping Linda and leaving behind buckets of cat hair. Affectionate and gentle, Blaise is an accomplished escape artist who at least twice last week soon after our arrival, escaped out the back door of the rectory, the second time by roughly pushing aside a blocking chair and ice chest but has since been flummoxed and meowingly frustrated by heavier deterrents.  Above, rectory at five o’clock Thursday morning as I return from a short visit into Trinity Church to snap a picture of the Rectory as first built in 1900:  Taken from Avenue E, which then was Chestnut Street. Rear of the church building in the background, the picture shows the north side of the house before the new master bedroom was added over the kitchen (window shutters closed). Man and two children IDK, perhaps the Rector. Pe...

A withdrawn and therefore happily peaceful Wednesday morning, sitting at the old tin top table looking out the kitchen window at US Highway98. This 1900 window, which I removed, refinished, and added new sash cord back in the late 1980s, was made by the Apalachicola Cypress Company, stenciled on its edge.  Added carelessly, perhaps incompetently , to the 1900 rectory later, the master bedroom is above the kitchen; I can hear Linda walking around up there.  Incompetently because in our years here, that bedroom floor had a one or two inch drop from west to east, that a marble rolled quickly down; and the weight of the addition, not competently supported, caused the four kitchen windows looking east toward fence and alley to sag in the middle. Also, in the old “family room” the south wall was torn out years ago to open and enlarge the room enclosing the wrap-round porch, causing that room's ceiling profusely to leak in rainstorms, such that in our years here we had to move...