Hills of Eden. Jory OSB Sherman

      Many years ago, I made a vow to myself. I changed my hours to accommodate

      that silent promise. I have never regretted the commitment:

      Never miss a sunrise. Never miss a sunset.

      The Coming of Spring

      Some days here, you can sense the coming of spring to these Ozarks hills. There is the urgency of the morning tapping at your mind with the insistence of crickets. There is the dawn itself, with its ruddy cheeks, its promise of a long day’s sun. This special dawn is more confident, healthier, stronger, livelier than it was during the long winter.

      The morning, on these sweet Ozarks days, shrugs its shoulders like a young child. You can feel the warm smile of the day on your face when you open the door. April rushes up to you on a girl’s silver skates and sprays you with a splash of icy breeze delicate as a silken shawl. A deep breath tastes of cedar and redbuds and dogwood blossoms. The lake breeze is fresh, bright as sleek trout moving in shallow creek waters.

      A once-dry creek bed fills with snow melt, breaks through a deep hollow, wends its way along the thawed ground seeking life and the mingling with the big lake that was once a mighty river. The bluffs, still frigid with ice and secrets, catch the warming sun, reluctantly shed their long ermine beards, become shawls of dripping waterfalls. You can hear the water’s ancient song long into the night.

      Spring in the Ozarks is fickle, relentless, full of surprises. It brings out the raccoons, the opossums, the brown robber birds. Gray squirrels skitter down the oak trees with flaring paramecium tails and chittery voices. The air soars across the newborn land, full of promises and pleasant whispers.

      This is the way Spring is for me here. This is the way it moves in and heads for summer. This is the way it sings its green songs, weaves its gold sun threads during its time of birthing. It is awesome in its quietness, splendid in its muscling youth. You can’t help but feel the continuity of the universe, the perfect rhythms beneath the seeming chaos, the symmetry of life itself.

      A man doesn’t need much more than this.

      Spring in the Ozarks is fickle, relentless, full of surprises.

      A deep breath tastes of cedar and redbuds and dogwood blossoms

      The Butterflies

      One day I saw a butterfly float through the woods on golden wings. Free of the cocoon and winter, he fluttered across the lane in a scurry, threading an invisible flight path in the warm spring sun, like a dancer having nothing to do, showing off his new wings.

      Two weeks before, I saw his brother, too early for spring, perched on a broken branch clustered with cedar sprigs that had fallen to the snow.

      Thinking it alive and resting from its flight, I stooped down to look at the creature more closely. It didn’t move. My hand reached out to touch its wing and I saw its feet were fastened to the branch. It had been frozen there, its wings spread wide. Perfectly preserved, it looked as though it had been waiting for the cold to pass.

      I brought the butterfly home, still locked to its foothold on the browned cedar branch, and set it on one of the bookcases.

      The quick and the dead, the one a flight, skimming on the warm zephyrs of Cedar Creek, the early butterfly caught in the chill, as though pinned to the earth midway in its course by a lepidopterist. I take no meaning from these things, but only marvel that some beings fly and some are stiffened by the late, hanging-on winter.

      The butterflies must have a time clock inside them that tells them it is time to break free of the branches and head for open spaces. Nature sometimes plays the fickle lady and taunts her delicate charges with the whispering lips of death.

      This is what happened with the frozen butterfly. He was no less the flying dancer, but he looked up at blue skies over the lake and felt the warmth of a cloudless day too soon. Eager fellow, anxious to strut and show off his bright yellow wings, he became that year’s Icarus of the forest, a victim of unperfected cryogenics.

      The butterfly will never come alive again, never dance on the air, never fly above the gelid perch where he last drew breath.

      The one who waited, the one I saw dazzle his way above the still snowy earth, might make his way into summer. I hope he does. He has my heart in his wings. He flitted away like an old movie, into infinity, his body growing smaller and smaller until he finally winked out of sight.

      There is really no vocabulary to explain such things. It’s just that we all have a quirk about life and sometimes life has a quirk about us. The butterfly that flew away is just as gone as the one that I placed on my bookcase. I see them both equally in the tapestry of life. Both are vivid in my mind, both are real. Both are gone.

      Butterflies now give me a very strange feeling. Life is so ephemeral, for them and for us.

      I wish I could explain how I feel about them. I wish they could explain about me.

      Butterflies now give me a very strange feeling.

      Life is so ephemeral, for them and for us.

      Farm in Morning

      He stood on the steps of morning. Stood on the bare lean brink of it and looked at the wet green field beyond the fence that kept the cows away from the house. The field was dulled by morning dew because the sun had not yet risen above the horizon, and its green was soft, like fur, and quiet like a thick pale-green quilt atop a featherbed. It was so quiet he could hear his heart beat, and his stomach fluttered at that moment as it always did early when the smell of dew and grass was strong on the light air and before the sunrise that he knew would come.

      The house was still asleep, but a comfort to him, big and white and two-storied with a front porch that looked out over the big field and the barn. There was a back porch that gave them a view of the small quarter-acre garden and the chicken coop, the outhouse beyond. He had built these things, built the fences, the chicken coop, the outhouse, and his wife had planted the garden after he plowed it with the mule pulling a moldboard plow, the blade slicing into the earth and turning it over, peeling back the clods that leaked fat earthworms and the white grubs with little brown eyeless faces.

      He smelled the garden, too, and heard the General, the little bantam rooster with the golden epaulets on his shoulders. He heard the General crow and heard the whip-flap of his wings as he stretched and boasted of his dominion over five bantam hens.

      The farmer laughed and walked to the gate, vowing to fix its sag one day, and he opened the gate and walked through it, down the little path he had worn through the grass. He strolled to the barn, past the pond, and now the smell of musty hay and manure was strong in his nostrils and the cows made burly throat sounds and amplified them with their chests. He spoke to them and they followed him as he strode past the fence, and they stood there, lowing and watching him with rolling round eyes. They slabbed heavy tongues over their lips as he pulled the hay down from the stack of bales and broke it up into biscuits and began tossing the flat chunks over the fence, walking along it and spreading the hay out so the cows could all get to it.

      He had grown this hay, too, in the other field, and baled it, trucked it here to his barn in the wide green pasture. There were only a few cows here now, and they had been certified free of contamination. The milk cows had been sold off according to government edict, and the farmer and his wife now bought their milk in town like everybody else.

      He went inside