Spring Crocus

Crocus vernus

An early blooming crocus is depicted on its last day of life.
That night it was served by the Natural Order as salad for a deer.
Not long passed before the deer ate all of the crocus blooms and most of the stems.
The bloom was 5cm in diameter and 11cm from base to petal tip.

∞
Photo by Beau Bosko at Crow's Cottage on February 27, 2012

The Deer Ate the Crocus.

Monday, July 23, 2012
Rural Washington County, Arkansas

I am
ah gonna tell you a story beginning today, one hundred forty-five days after a leap day at the end of February, a day already lost, a day when resolve arrived like a bud on a sapling, fragile and evocative of hope.  I like hope — even at this late stage of the game — because it stands for desire and trust, the coming of attainment.  Like the sapling, it won't stay still.

It seems forever ago, that leap day, not five months but a lifetime. The pool of passed time becomes murky, depthless.  The Familiars who float on the margins and wallow in the mud banks tell me that one day I'll wake up and the story will fall silent.  Now or it's never which shall I choose?

I'll tell the story in installments, or chapters, or episodes, or successive posts, tell it in whatever form and manner that develops, naturally, with the passage of time.  I'll tell it day by day, night to night, as best I know how.  It's a story about my life, the only life I have, the one I share with Sadie Liz and the shepherd dogs at a place in the country we call Three Dog Acres.  Here among the trees, bushes, grasses, flowers, and stones stands Crow's Cottage, my shelter from every storm and the temporal home to body and mind.

Some of the story will be true to life in the manner we've come to understand such things, grounded in fact and dedicated to the principles of objective realism, or some such philosophical construct — measurable, perceptible, and independent of reverie.  Other parts of the tale will be fantastic, dreamy — true only to the life of the imagination.  I'll get this worked out before the end comes.

My tale will follow a primary theme, the natural history of the flora and fauna at Three Dog Acres, mostly because any good story needs a reliable foundation.  From there I'll wander along any avenue of inqury that fortune and circumstance present to me.

Fortuna was a goddess, spinner of the Wheel, guardian of the good harvest, attendant of the path toward home and away from darkness.  She helps each of us beat dark home, an act of confirmation, signaling that security is gained.

As a sum of all essential things, circumstance moves through the life of a man like a fixed orb moving across the heavens, revealing in its starry dance the inevitable presence of divine intervention.  Preachers and holy folk link it to the actions of a God in control, intimating that each of us is a son or daughter of the Lord of Circumstance.  It imparts context to the fragments.

But I drift.

How can the story be told?  One way is directly. In a plainspoken voice, free of heavy embellishment. Call it the minimalist approach. Crisp and logical, it makes good sense objectively. Like the bloom of a perennial tuber, it's easy to put your hands on and your nose up against — and it's not likely to hold center in the life of my imagination. I can't help but ride on the winds, fall into digression, and stray from the theme for an aside or an interjection.

Each and all — fact or fantasy, objective measurement or daydream, scientific table of measurement or fractal chain of metaphor — are valid forms of expression, equally real from the perspective of my desktop, a thick black-cherry slab. It was carved from a felled tree by a 55-inch circular steel blade at the sawmill on Moon Hull Mountain some many years ago. Upon the slab and adjacent white-oak planks sit hard drives, mother boards, flat pixelated screens, assorted pieces of hardware, and the mysterious modulated electric fields containing software and charged channels leading outward into the world. They give me a path to you, one previously denied by the blackball and blocked by the wreckage of too many burned bridges.

The desire of my heart is that you find the story worthy. I'll send it now on weary wings far into the ether and hope for the best.