Reflections by Doc Arnett

May the Spirit of God

lead you today

in the path of peace and righteousness.

May he guide you in the way of wisdom

and turn you from every temptation.

May the Lord and Savior,

the risen Christ,

bring you healing and comfort

from all wounds

and grant you grace for forgiveness.

May the Heavenly Father

anoint you

with the oil of kindness.

May he bestow upon you

the blessing of mercy and compassion.

May the God Who Is One

bring to you

the full abundance of life

that your eyes may be fixed on Heaven

and your heart on the things that are above.

And may you never forget

that we have been put here

in this place

at this time

to be salt and light.

And love.

Amen.

H. Arnett

4/6/11

The smooth edge of the front

hangs above the horizon toward the east.

A brightening light

spills between the line of the ridge

and the cold slate of the clouds.

The wind that blew hard and strong

all day long yesterday

is just beginning to stir again.

Its sending brought a fresh

scattering of leaves and limbs.

Branches dead or weakened from other winds

fell from trees,

caught in the grass beneath them.

Trash and debris from passing cars and trucks

fluttered in the clumps of fescue along the road

until some burst of breeze lifted pieces,

moved them to some new catching place.

Tonight, they say,

the wind will lay again

and tomorrow will come more gently.

We will see, I suppose,

though I know

it is the stirrings within

that more determine what sort of day will come.

It is a different air that brings hope or despair,

a rushing from the heart

that often scatters its debris

across the pattern of our lives.

Or else

furnishes its blessing

like a gentle breeze

in the burn of a dry, hot day.

H. Arnett

4/5/11

It’s a bit unusual to have such contrast in the same day but not unheard of, by any means. I had two emails at work, one announcing the birth of a colleague’s new grandchild. The other one gave notice that another colleague’s thirty-four-year-old son had been killed in an accident.

To one family, the joy of new birth, of new life. To another, incredible sadness, shock and pain. In one family, a baby received with excitement and anticipation. In the other, three children lost their father and their mother lost her friend and lover.

In continuing confirmation of this world’s mix of giving and taking, another announcement celebrated the birth of yet another colleague’s grandson. In response to my congratulations, she thanked me and told me that her aunt had just passed away. Sometimes, the bitter and the sweet meet in the same house at the same time.

As long as this world continues, there will be such stirrings. Although this world often has its fine moments, there is never any lack of tragedy and disaster. The earth shudders and shrugs its shoulders, mountains heave and entire communities vanish. Spring comes, bringing its glory of bloom and blossom and other as well. Warm air and cold collide and houses are tossed about like toys, smashed and shredded like paper and popsicle sticks.

Through all of this, we must never fail to lift one another up in prayer, whether in praise or for strengthening. And, let us also rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.

Our sharing helps make the celebration full and the enduring possible.

H. Arnett

4/1/11

The morning sky sags, heavy and gray,

drooped around dead trees and grass

like frayed cloth.

Broken branches hang,

caught in twisted strands

from the ice storm three years ago.

Clumps of sloughed growth

spread across the field and backyard

of an abandoned house,

its windows dark,

black in the bleakness

of this morning’s dim light.

And yet,

there is a growing tinge of green

screened by tufts of last year’s dying,

faint but filling in

the burned spaces of the pasture

and along the ditch bank:

A seasonal freshening coming,

ancient roots sending up the renewal of spring,

filling in the barren patches

of winter’s scourging.

H. Arnett

3/31/11

Found a pamphlet on the table last night. I think it fell out of our newspaper when I opened it. Either that, or someone walked in while we were gone and laid it on the kitchen table. So, I’m hoping it had been stuffed into the paper.

Regardless of how it arrived, its claim is the more interesting aspect of the story. According to Family Bible or some similarly named organization purporting to be from California, Judgment Day will be on May 21, 2011. The group uses the same sort of logic for their calculation as has made fools of numerous other wannabe prophets.

I’m guessing they’ll get some people all stirred up, amuse quite a few more and maybe even disappoint a few folks. Nothing like getting all riled up for something that doesn’t happen when it was predicted to happen to get your dadgummer a’hummin’.

Folks like this always skip right over Jesus’ emphatic declaration that neither he nor the angels in heaven knew when Judgment Day was going to be. Of course, it’s been a while since he said that so maybe these folks figure things have changed on that point.

I won’t be stockpiling any more food than I did when we closed out the previous millennium. As I recall, during the Y2K party, airplanes did not fall from the sky, the power grid did not go down and Armageddon did not commence as predicted. There were also a few other end of the world predictions back in the mid-20th Century. The failure of those predictions and the fact that this current one comes a group based in California helps take some of the shock out of the forecast. So, pardon me while I don’t get too worked up about it.

What I will be doing is continuing my awareness that the Lord could come at any time. It is my firm intent to rise up and meet him in the air.

Without any pamphlets.

H. Arnett

3/30/11

I wake from this dream with a heaviness,

something other than the sinus headache

that keeps hanging on from one day

to another to another.

In it, I am sitting in the back seat

of a car that one of my sons is driving

even though he, too,

is sitting in the back seat.

Randa and a young woman I don’t know

are sitting in the front

but Ben is holding the steering wheel

and sitting in the back seat.

He veers from side to side

of a narrow road with no traffic,

each time coming just a bit closer

to the edge where the shoulder falls away.

He insists that he is driving just fine

and that there is nothing wrong

with his seeing or his steering,

veers again, mid-sentence.

I sit on the edge of the bed,

awake and wondering

whether this is fear

or prophecy

or just another serving

of that strange subconscious soup

stirred up by supper and TV,

ancient memories and a recent visit.

I’m not sure that every dream has meaning

nor that every vision is intended for reality.

But I do believe that there is such a thing

as premonition.

I will pray now

and call Ben later.

But not

much later.

H. Arnett

3/29/11

Dan has prepared fish, small fillets skinned and marinated to take away the mud flavor. His wife, Christie, has cooked white beans and corn and puts a pan of cornbread into the oven. While she makes a salad and Dan and his brother, Ben, cook the fish on the back porch, I pitch to Reese, who just turned six last Sunday. We are using his new ball and bat and he is doing pretty well for a just-turned-six-year-old. When he finally strikes out, he insists on pitching to me. So, I oblige with the enthusiasm of a grandpa.

When the cooking is done, we gather in the kitchen for prayer before the serve yourself off the stove supper. I go into the living room and bring Granny in to join us. On the way, she asks me, “What size family do you have?” and is startled by the answer. “You have a large family!”

Choked by the sadness of loosing my mother before she dies, I verge on breaking down in front of the whole group. My throat tightens and my eyes water for a moment. And, then, I say to myself, “This is who she is now, Harold. Accept it and move on.”

She eats a good supper, finishing her plate soon after the rest of us. She joins me in a dessert of cornbread and honey and then takes the last piece of fish when we have managed to convince her no one else wants it.

During the goodbyes, she tells Dan, “You have a wonderful family.” As I am walking her to the car, she tells me “You have a wonderful family.” She lost her husband almost two years ago, a little more weight and much of her memory but she has become sweeter, gentler and more appreciative. Sometimes life puts on us a better trade than we would have made voluntarily.

Driving through the darkness back over to Coldwater, I start singing old hymns. She joins me halfway through the first verse, singing harmony.

Through ten miles and five songs, she doesn’t miss a single note or word.

H. Arnett

3/28/11

My nephew and I meet at Granny’s as planned on Tuesday morning. I join him inside the house just long enough to say hello to Mom and her caretaker, Ann. We go back out and get started on cleaning up the yard.

Just past thirty, Brad is lean, tough and chiseled. Even as a kid, he was the hardest worker in his family and that quality has not diminished in him. By noon, we have picked up all of the fallen branches around the house. The burn pile has worked its way past the flame stage into an intensely hot bed of coals. We have also raked the leaves away from the back of the house and burned the ones that were not wet and matted.

Just before lunch, Brad starts raking next to the front side of the house and I burn off the south part of the yard. Just as the last edge of red curls the grass into black wiggles of ash, Ann calls us in for lunch.

Soon after we go back out, Mom joins us. She is ninety-five and weighs but a pound for each of those years. Her legs and arms are so thin it seems they would break under their own weight. She shuffles around the cans and pots of plants lined against the south edge of the house, using an old house broom both as tool and crutch.

She works for a while, then, trying to sweep leaves out from under the small, low porch in the ell of the house. Of course, the broom is no tool for such as that, sliding over the tops of the leaves again and again. I step over beside her, use the leaf rake to reach in between the steps and drag out piles of leaves.

Brad has continued sweeping the yard, windrowing a long line for the burning. After that has burned, we turn to the real work of the day.

With hickory trees growing on three sides, the house is surrounded by a treacherous mat of nuts and hulls. Their round shape makes walking unpleasant for young, healthy persons and outright hazardous for a frail old woman. It is easy to sprain an ankle when a nut rolls under the heel of your foot. Brad and I gather up around seventy-five gallons and dump them, one wheelbarrow load at a time, on the fire. With the dense nuts packed in and blocking off the air, they will smolder and burn for three days.

As we finish the last section of raking and burning, I step over to Mom and put an arm gently around her shoulders, “It’s been a long time since you and I burned leaves together, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, it has,” she agrees and here we are finally on the same plane. I honestly can’t remember when it was, sometime back when I was in high school, I think. And she is not quite sure whom it is that she is talking to.

I am sure of this, though: It is no longer the smoke that is stinging my eyes.

H. Arnett

3/25/11

Well, well, well, March Madness is full underway again. I suppose I could be talking about whatever it is that draws rural men to play with fire or the way that the first hint of green makes others want to get right busy pulling out the old dried plants from the flower bed. I could be talking about the sudden nonsense that has college kids walking around in coats and shorts.

Those are all hints and symptoms of sorts, I guess, but the real story, for those of us who grew up with an old iron rim nailed to a real board backboard mounted to wooden posts set in the ground of the back yard, is basketball.

I hardly watch the game anymore until tournament time. Boy Howdy, do I tune in then!

I love the drama of a close game, as long as I don’t really care which team wins. Otherwise, I prefer that my team have about a thirty-point lead throughout the game. I’m really not an adrenaline junkie, at all. Watching the sun come up is about as much excitement as I need in a day.

That’s a good thing, too, because if I were a gambling man, I’d be bawling my eyes out. My brackets already look like spaghetti in a blender and we aren’t even through the first full round of play. Astute predictor of victory, I am not.

What I have observed, though, is that a good team with discipline, focus and dramatic devotion to teamwork will often beat what is reputed to be a much better group of athletes. A team with more commitment to winning than to personal stats will frequently end up with more points than the group with the nation’s highest average scorer.

My life doesn’t revolve around basketball, though I have loved the game since before I was able to barely get the ball to the rim. I think its highest form comes when five athletes work together in such harmony that they become a single unit. Thinking together, working together, moving the ball quickly and smoothly until the person who happens to have the best opportunity takes the shot.

Unselfishness has always been key to humanity’s release from its greatest curses.

H. Arnett

3/18/11

I work the edges first,

back-burning along the fence line

to keep the fire from running into the woods.

Where the horse has not trampled,

the grass is eager for fire;

it catches and flames,

melting synthetic strands

of the lowest electric wire.

I beat back the surge with the leaf rake.

Smoke etches my eyes,

bringing tears while I stand in patches of fire

for a moment or two.

The wind switches sides

and I am able to work along the line of the posts,

getting most of the fire fodder

pulled away from the fence.

With a firebreak blackened,

I start the burn along the southern side of the pasture,

spreading the edge with the rake,

letting the wind take the work.

The smoke drifts in the lulls,

flattens in the gusts.

The moon hangs bright above the gray,

long thin streaks of clouds lining north below the shining.

The creeping red rim feeds in the stubble,

slipping around the matted flat of winter and walking,

flares in the occasional clump of standing grass.

It is midnight before

I finish the field,

fire dying in the damp nap of the sod.

I crush the remnants

beneath my soot-covered boots,

knowing that both hate and faith

can cling to the least red ember,

catching in the tinder of grass

and flashing out into life again.

H. Arnett

3/17/11