March Thirty

Published on 30 March 2025 at 08:23

Sunday, March 30, 2025, 19.3*

     No longer sustained by the dark, morning calmly extinguishes the candle flames standing sentinel in every window. Raw silk spreads across the sky, lies flat as if ironed without a crease. Snow abides. Soleil shines.

     A pair of seagulls glides through the trees soundlessly. Though some ice remains, the stream feeding the pond has lost her urgency. Zayne, enthralled by something stands like a statue peering through the fence.

     There were no fences on the red clay land of childhood. Ichabod, the liver and white one I chose as my reward for finding the neighbor’s beagle pups, was never leashed. He was a squirmy puppy not a surrogate baby to dress, to wrap in a blanket, to carry about, to push in a pram. I wanted him to be. Yes. I named him. It’s funny now to think of introducing that pup, “Here’s my boy Ichabod. I love him.”

When I was a child, I talked like a child.

My thoughts were a child's thoughts.

I understood things in a way that a child understands.

But now that I have become a man,

I have stopped being like a child.

1 Corinthians 13:11 Easy English Bible

Photo: LJ Austin