Banner Elk

The thread of western North Carolina seems to have woven itself through the tapestry of my life. It began with a summer vacation to the Great Smoky Mountains, one of only a two family holidays I distinctly remember. The magic in the babbling brooks, verdant mountains, and clean, clear air captivated my young imagination. Since then, their beauty has drawn me back nearly a dozen times for camping trips, Boy Scout camp, driving excursions, novel research, even for Karen’s and my honeymoon. So naturally, this year, we chose to revisit that same inn in Banner Elk for our twentieth anniversary.

I know a lot of geeks, so I regularly hear the pointed questions: Where are our transporters? What about our teleporting stones? I contend that technology already exists, if you know how to squint and look at it. It’s just slower than we’d like. First, we get into small, familiar chambers decorated to our individual tastes with our individual choice of music. Then, we hang out in a large room where we replenish ourselves with familiar brands of coffee and prepared food before we trundle into seats in a long tube to fill the time with that same familiar soundtrack along with our books and other entertainments. And when we eventually emerge a few hours later, we stare out onto a vista of someplace completely different.

Though the settings of this Slow Glass machinery can be bit arcane. If you aren’t careful, you sometimes make a pit stop somewhere back in time. Such was the case with Charlotte airport with its numerous shoeshine stands and full-time restroom attendants (complete with bowls of peppermint candies and tip jars). At least they’ve graduated into an era of pink power tools, you know, for the ladies.  But that was just a thankfully short diversion before we found ourselves standing at the gateway to the mountains.

From the airport, as if to reinforce the magical, teleportation theme, Karen and I drove up mountainsides and through river valleys shrouded with mystery and fog. While the car interior was a little larger and slightly more barren, from its speakers the songs remained the same. Once we finally broke free of the low-slung clouds, the scenery beyond the windows was composed of almost entirely of wood, water, stone and deep blue sky.

Archer’s Mountain Inn perches just over halfway up Beech Mountain, almost a mile high, looking south across the valley toward Banner Elk, Linville and Grandfather Mountain. After a brief stop for provisioning at the local grocery (with a tidy section of organics and a selection of good wine), we settled in for the next five days.

On our honeymoon, we remember touring nearby Grandfather Mountain, Linville Falls, Linville Caverns, and the Folk Art Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway. We discovered an Everything Scottish shop and a local pottery outlet, both of which seem to have slipped beneath the surface of the lake of time. That trip, though not this one, we brought our hiking boots but didn’t find many public trails.

A few years ago, North Carolina remedied that deficiency with the addition of 2600 acres in the form of a newly christened Grandfather Mountain State Park. The precise moment of the spring equinox found us beside a tumbledown stream on its Profile Trail. Over the next two days, we hiked several miles of trails, the Asutsi and the Nuwati, down a section of the Boone’s Fork and up to the panorama at Storyteller’s Rock. We revisited all three overlooks at Linville Falls, and wandered around the grounds of the Moses Cone Manor. Even without boots, we managed almost nine miles in three days. And I discovered Birkenstocks make perfectly good trekking shoes even over rocky terrain. 

When we weren’t hiking, we were driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway with its bright yellow bouquets of roadside daffodils. Robins darted through the wine-stained branches of the maples that had just begun to leaf. Forsythia and dogwood were already in bloom, with mountain laurel set to be next up on the stage. We roamed across twisty back roads whose fields and farmsteads reminded us of Wales without the castles, Scotland without the sheep. We stumbled across places we’d researched for Aluria’s Tale (my novel). We poked through two of the shops of the Southern Highland Craft Guild, the Parkway Craft Center near Blowing Rock and the Folk Art Center in Asheville.

A couple nights we sampled the cuisine at the adjacent Jackalope’s View Restaurant, and one other at an Italian bistro down in the valley. After dinner each evening, we warmed ourselves by the fireplace in our room, Anonymous 4 on the iPod, books, wine and chocolate in hand. Which is also how we spent the last full day when fog, rain and a few snow flurries with a threat of ice kept us atop the mountain. Neither of us felt up for tackling the switchbacks in a foreign SUV. By the time the fire burned to glowing embers, we found ourselves standing by the bank of windows taking in the view. A comfortable silence spread over us as we gazed across the valley at a tangled web of lights, the pauses between them somewhat shorter than they’d been our trip before.

The last morning, we wandered out to an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway and up an ice-sheathed path to an arched, wooden bridge to look down on one final fall of water over rocks. On our way, we saw our one and only deer. We daydreamed as we poked our way back to Asheville and wondered if this was a place to which we might retire as the morning and early afternoon slipped by.

At the airport, the spell was broken. All too soon we found ourselves back home, safely ensconced in our own bed once again, Nyala and Mara purring by our sides, vowing next time, we won’t wait too long before returning to our rejuvenating mountain retreat.


© 2014 Edward P. Morgan III

Teamwork (Spring Equinox 2014)

Teamwork - a reading (on YouTube)

Teamwork is learning to be silent while your wife talks to a contractor or salesman until he is focused on her and ignoring you, then snapping him back to reality when he says something stupid with a quick and deadly riposte. Throws them into complete confusion, opening up a flank. Like a pair of mated wolves, we circle, attack and retreat. We guard each other’s backs. And like our lupine totems, we are mated for life.

I learned early on Karen was not a typical woman bound to the traditional female roles. Fragile and high-maintenance she is not. She’s not afraid to get her hands dirty. And in the best traditions of red-haired Swedish Valkyries, she’s proven she will fight.

Karen and I had only been dating a little while. We’d gone to see a movie, something with a lot of action, maybe the first of the Lethal Weapon series. It must have been out a while. I remember the theater was almost empty. Except for two obnoxious guys sitting a couple rows behind us who had apparently seen the movie several times already as they commented loudly line by line.

About halfway through the movie, my annoyance got the better of me. I turned over my shoulder and in a fit of testosterone-fueled repartee said, and I quote, “Shut up, asshole.”

Silence descended behind us like a shroud, and remained in place from that point forward. Now some people might think that was a good thing, that my small blow for theater etiquette had actually accomplished something. That did not fit with my experience. Where I grew up, silence is an ominous development. And there was a quality to this silence, a stewing bitterness marinating a grudge until it was ready to explode into action. I sat through the rest of that movie not really enjoying it. Some niggling feeling told me the encounter wasn’t over. I really didn’t like having these two guys behind me where I couldn’t see them.

Now, some people will think I was just being paranoid, which I generally admit I might be. I’ve had friends from high school tell me they’ve never seen me sit with my back to a door. I always map out the exits and make note of anything that can be used as an improvised weapon. Not something I do consciously. Again, part of my upbringing. But in this case, that hyper-vigilance paid off.

The movie ended and the theater began to empty. In a fit of whimsy my wife, then girlfriend, decided she wanted to stay and watch the credits roll. I took the opportunity to glance behind me. Sure enough, my newfound friends were watching, too. My danger-sense kicked into overdrive.

I tracked them as we left the theater. They fell in just behind us. Karen continued chatting about the movie but I paid no attention. She isn’t always alert to her surroundings. Her upbringing has her oblivious to many threats. I didn’t want to worry her, so I said nothing, just kept watching the pair from the corner of my eye. I know, typical male.

By the time we hit the parking lot, we’d put some distance between us. For an instant, I lost the pair completely. There seemed to be a ray of hope.

We reached Karen’s car without incident. Karen had driven as her car was always more reliable. She had just opened the driver’s door when the duo behind us suddenly reappeared, rapidly closing the distance as I stepped between the cars. Two guys, one small, one large. The small one peeled off toward Karen’s side of the car to stand at the back quarter panel. The large one came up quickly behind me. The lot was full, so there was another car beside me. There wasn’t a car in front of us, but I wasn’t about to flee. To complicate matters further, this was one of the few times Karen had worn a skirt.

So I turned to face our pursuer and found myself looking up. At six foot one, I am not a short man. But he had two to three inches on me. Blond hair, broad shoulders, triangular chest, beveled chin. An Aryan post-child with a scraggly beard.

Now, you have to remember this was the ‘80’s. There were no cell phones. Automatic locks were not a standard feature on a car like my wife’s. We weren’t married, so I didn’t have a key. It wouldn’t have mattered if I did, as my own keys were interlaced between my fingers. The only weapon I had.

That’s when Stonewall Jackson stepped up right into my personal space and in his best redneck drawl asked, “Did you call me an ass…hole?”

Ship to shore radio, this is the Titanic. Man the lifeboats, boys; we are going down.  We were in parking lot in West Melbourne, which on the scale of civilization is one step up from Holopaw, or Yulee, only more densely populated. I could count on no outside help. We had parked in the outer reaches away from the densest crowd. The best I could hope at this point was that Karen might eventually retrieve me from a pool of my own blood after these two goons used me to vent their spleens.

But you have to remember, I was born a Southerner. I have Welsh and Abenaki blood. My people pursue entirely hopeless causes long past the point of sanity. If I was going down, I’d be damned if it be as a coward, not in front of my girlfriend. So stupid me, the Boy Scout who figured honesty was always the best policy, didn’t treat the question as rhetorical, and simply answered, “Yes.”

And that’s when Karen did something completely unexpected. Instead of retreating inside her car (and maybe unlocking my door), my wife, then girlfriend, who had no real commitment to me at the time, slammed her door, swore under her breath, and took a couple steps toward the smaller guy with murder in her eye, heels off and skirt swirling. I didn’t take my eyes from the monster in front of me, but I saw this was more than his hanger-on wannabe had bargained for. The little guy quickly backed away toward his buddy, halfway across the trunk of my wife’s car and still moving. Ok, so if it came to blows, it was just me against the Shropshire Slasher. Things were looking up.

I saw the Sasquatch had also caught the motion out of the corner of his eye. But instead of cutting his losses and calling it a night, he decided to double down like bullies always do. He stepped up nose to nose and demanded, “Why?”

Now, off all the words I’d expected might fall out of his mouth, that question was not one. A moment of crystal clarity followed. This guy had no intention of throwing the first punch. He was trying to get me to do it for him. I got the sense he’d done this many times before. But his lapdog cowering from an advancing woman wasn’t in the plan. Tactically, his situation had become fluid. His flank was crumbling. In an instant, he could find himself in the reverse position of his ambush, the odd man out in a three-way. And not the good kind.

But I wasn’t confident enough to test my theory, so I opted to stall for time. Bravery isn’t usually a conscious act. More often, it’s having little left to lose. So again, I answered his question honestly. “Because you were acting like one.”

They say Fortune favors the bold. That night the Roman goddess must smiled down upon both Karen and me. Before Bigfoot could puzzle out a response, a voice called over the roof of the car beside me. “Hey, Ed, everything ok?”

Both the gorilla and I turned to look. There, standing one car away, was a guy I’d taken a Creative Writing class with a year before, his girlfriend watching intently across the roof of his car. Though Karen didn’t know him, she had caught his eye with an imploring look. I must have made some kind of impression on him because, too be honest, I didn’t even know he knew my name. I certainly didn’t remember his.

I swung my gaze back to meet the great ape’s. Even this genius could do the math. Two men and two women against him and tagalong whose morale had already broken. He could no longer count on any of us staying out of it. He quickly re-evaluated and claimed the better part of valor. He told me to watch myself and slowly backed away, his buddy clinging to his wake. Then George and Lennie faded back into the night.

As soon as I’d reached the safely of the car, I damn near fainted. I turned to Karen and asked why she’d chosen to confront these guys in a way few men or women would.

“If there was going to be a fight,” she answered, “I’d be damned if it was going to be two on one.”

From the moment I first saw my wife, I knew I wanted to go out with her. As it turned out, I had to wait third in line. That night, I knew my perseverance had been rewarded. I doubt I would have survived that encounter unscathed without her.

Recently, I had a dream where a man explained why you always hit someone hard and fast. They freeze from the shock of the impact. Then you can seize the initiative. It’s all tactics. Though it also helps if you have a surprise in your back pocket, especially if she’s dressed up in a skirt.

Twenty-seven years later, on our twentieth wedding anniversary, I still very much love working beside my wife. To this day, I know I can rely on her in a way few men can. We’re a team and always will be. What the gods have joined, no man may sunder. At least without the proper sacrifice of blood.

Happy anniversary, love.


 © 2014 Edward P. Morgan III

Tens

Tens - a reading (on YouTube)

I’m coming up on a decadal birthday anniversary. These are the ones everyone in our society seems to take most note of, as if reaching a certain age is a major life accomplishment. It beats the alternative, I guess. Though honestly, 13 and 21 are bigger events in most young people’s minds than 10 and 20. But 3-0 begins the first in a series of “big” birthdays.

I can’t say I’m looking forward to this one. Not because I feel old, merely older. It’s like losing my hair, my age is not something I hide, or hide from. More, I think I’m apprehensive because the past has taught me that big birthday anniversaries often bring big changes, not all of them for the better.

Within six months of my turning ten, my parents divorced which pretty much turned my world upside down. By the fall of that year, I had gone from being distinctly middle class to qualifying for free lunch at school. The next few years were the darkest of my childhood.

The day I turned twenty, my father called my mother to try to convince her to cut off what support she gave me for college. Their divorce agreement mandated he pay for half my tuition because of money he’d raided from an educational fund. His call chained to her calling me in tears, and then me calling him to tell him never to call her again when he’d been drinking. But he succeeded in his quest a year later when she cut me off without warning. Unlucky for him, I came up with the cash to hold up my end of the bargain so he was still on the hook for his.

When I turned thirty, I was in the midst of planning a wedding. My wife and I were married a month later, the best day of my life. But six months after that, I learned a family secret that led to arguably the two toughest years of my life, perhaps barring 2007. The scar they left still aches some days and in fact may never heal. My only comfort lies in knowing my reaction may have prevented someone else from sharing her experience.

A week after I turned forty, my wife was in surgery having the last real hope of our ever having children removed. Only a handful of people came to visit her in the hospital, giving me my first real taste of how in hard times, friends sometimes disappear. A few weeks later, an erstwhile friend decided it was a good time to malign her in an email. It didn’t end well for him, or the friendship.

Those were hard years. Against that backdrop, I’m uncertain what this year will bring. I am not superstitious just cautious from my experience. Coincidence does not indicate causation. And the changes those years brought helped define who I am now, much of it for the better.

As I look back, in an odd way I take comfort from the tarot. Okay, first, let’s clear up a misconception. Like the I Ching, the primary purpose of the tarot is not some sort of mystical divination. More, both act as intuitive guides to illuminate sometimes unrecognized patterns. The Major Arcana of a tarot deck track a spiritual journey from the Fool to Enlightenment (the World). The Minor Arcana highlight aspects of the ordinary distractions that crop up along the way.

The Minor Arcana are divided into four suits that mirror the four classical elements of antiquity, coins – earth, cups – water, wands – fire, swords – air, with the Major Arcana acting as a binding Spirit. Together, they create a useful metaphor, a lens through which to view this life.

Similar to ordinary playing cards, each suit of the Minor Arcana is divided into ten numbered cards and four face cards, princess, knight, queen and king. Each ace through ten tracks a secondary cycle of events shaped by the influence of its suit. Where the ace represents the essence of an element, the ten represents its excess, for good or ill. In the case of cups, it’s an overflow of joy. In wands, an oppressive burden. In coins, material comfort taken for granted. In swords, a ridiculous amount of pain. Where the nines truly capture the epitome of each suit, the tens are like that second helping of ice cream you know you shouldn’t eat. Even of a good thing, they are little too much. And of a bad thing, they are overkill.

If you roll all those tens together, you come up with the ten of the Major Arcana titled The Wheel of Fortune. Depending on which interpretation you ascribe to, the Wheel is the random events of life over which you have no control. Or sometimes, it’s reminder that pride comes before a fall. At its heart it represents the constancy of change. If you’ve been cast low, you have nowhere to go but up. If you’ve been raised high, be careful of that next step.

Which brings me full circle to the beginning and what this year will bring. A little bit of everything I expect, some joy, some tears, some success, some burden. In that way, life is a little like the weather: If you don’t like what’s outside at the moment, just wait a while and check again. I’ll guarantee it will be different.

As a friend pointed out to me this week, if we’d had six fingers, or four, instead of five, anniversaries divisible by ten wouldn’t be such a big deal (though I suspect anniversaries ending in zero still would be). The Chinese have such a system, a cycle of twelve years overlaid with a greater cycle of five. As with the I Ching, maybe they see life in broader patterns. So by that thought, in ten more years maybe I get to start again.

But at this point, the best I can hope is that I’ve only lived half my life already. It’s more likely I have less time left on this earth than I’ve already spent. If anything, that’s what weighs on me most about this birthday, what on my list remains undone and whether I get the chance to do it.

In the end, I need to remember to enjoy each season of each year while I’m in it. Winter for its quietude. Spring for its rebirth. Summer for its warmth. Fall for its harvest. And then we start over. Like counting up to ten. After all the events in recent years, maybe a little change wouldn’t be such a bad thing right now.

© 2014 Edward P. Morgan III 

Words (Imbolc 2014)

Words (Imbolc 2014) - a reading (on YouTube)

Years flow by in much the same cycle as nature. Some years, the fall acorns in our front oaks are light, other years heavy. One year, they filled up our neighbor's pickup bed. A few years ago, they were still raining down in December, something we’d never seen before. The fullness of each season is determined by unremembered events many months before. How cold was the previous winter? How wet was the previous spring?

Like those acorns, my writing goes in cycles, some lean years, some fat. Some years, I fill up notebooks and index cards with a bounty of excess, others I’m lucky to post handful of essays. Each time I sit down to create a new piece, the process is the same. After the initial excitement and inspiration, I come to a point where I hate everything I’ve written, where I want to throw it all away, where I think the piece will never come together. Eventually, it does but not before its time.

On days like that, I’ve learned to still my mind and let it wander until over-shy words creep in to fill the surrounding silence. Sometimes they surface in the memory of a long, lost vocabulary word. Other times, in snippets of dialog echoing through my head.

Everything begins with words. They form the rich loam in which I plant my ideas. I spot interesting usages in articles. I run across rich histories perusing my dictionary. I seek intriguing alternatives by consulting my thesaurus. I can spend hours surfing through sources like some people browse the web. Many words, like wine, need to be rolled along the tongue to be fully appreciated. Some words blend and mellow with age while others sour to vinegar if left too long unused.

Words written not spoken. Spoken words evaporate once uttered, scattering like a flock of winter starlings, or sometimes their restless companion crows, a murder or a murmuration. A few stragglers cling to memory here or there, forming a pattern or a stain but rarely a complete picture. Written words develop and endure, comforting me for many years before their edges become yellow and worn with age, and are eventually discarded.

I shroud myself in words. They are my blanket. They provide my warmth, my solace, my insulation from the cold, harsh world surrounding me. Words are my thoughts, my ideas and ideals, my identity. They are the glue binding together the book of this fragile, contradictory personality. Words form my cocoon, my chrysalis as I change and grow beneath them. They protect me at my most fragile. They console me as I age. One day words will bury me. And be buried with me.

The beginning of each new year reflects my writing process. As I impatiently await the first blossoms of spring, I lay out goals and inspirations, map out stories and ideas. Carried with the cold at Imbolc, there is electricity in the air as the energy for new and colorful creations swells the roots beneath the snow. To the outside eye it looks like nothing much is stirring. But like the lambs lingering in their mother’s wombs, unseen words shift below the surface, restlessly awaiting the right moment to emerge. 

© 2014 Edward P. Morgan III

Winter Solstice 2013

"Winter Solstice 2013" - a reading (on YouTube)

We open our eyes to a pale reflection in pink and orange. A long, gray wall of fog looms at the horizon like Hadrian's last defense. As the fog emerges from the soft gray light of dawn, we feel like distant lanterns, tiny candles floating aimlessly across the water.

A gray stillness settles outside as though the world has paused for breath. Through a misty haze, the daylight silvers as the morning ages. A faded white sun hangs motionless against the brushed platinum sky, a sun-bleached sun melting to moonrise by midafternoon.

As autumn deepens into winter, dappled sunlight brushes like mist against the screen until the fog melts into rain, washing the shadow from our minds. Droplets of air condense and run down its surface, filling the spaces in between like a memory of unfallen tears.

Fiery tendrils of the setting sun send steam drifting across the water and smoke swirling among the trees as fog coalesces from twilight. The golden fog burns along the horizon like the beacon of the Hermit's lantern guiding our way forward through another umbrageous day. Come evening spheres of silver, pink and gold hang below the streetlamps and house lights, iridescent ornaments in a nighttime world of fog.

Day by day, our ink fades a little further from the page until, one morning, nothing remains of each line of our lives but the shadow of a memory. This night, we light the sacred candles. In darkness we were born of fire. Small souls, at midwinter we return to ash, awaiting Brigid’s breath at Imbolc to be reborn. Another cycle lays behind us, craggy and arthritic yet complete, even as the next one beckons, her slender finger as pale and unblemished as the promise of the coming spring.

© 2013 Edward P. Morgan III

St. Joseph Peninsula State Park

Just before Thanksgiving, we made the seven hour trek up to Cape San Blas. We'd rented a cabin inside the park for the week. We stumbled into an open block and seized it. Getting reservations up there is always a trick. We hadn't been on a vacation away from home in over a year.

This was our third time staying up there. Since our last visit, they had added some counter space and a dishwasher to the kitchen, expanded the upstairs, removed a skylight and converted the fireplace over to gas. The cabins are a two-story, loft arrangement that sleep seven (as long as you're friendly), maybe 700 sq. feet total, with a screened in porch, a full kitchen and a short boardwalk down to the bay. They are away from pretty much everything, right next to miles of wilderness area that extends to the point of the peninsula. 

In the cabins there is no television, no telephone, no internet, no wi-fi and only spotty cell phone coverage at best. I think that's what we like about it. It forces us to slow down and disconnect. Hiking, reading, walking the beach, watching sunset and cooking become the highlights of our day. In four days, we hiked just over twenty miles. The fifth day was pretty much wind and rain. In our five full days up there, I finished three books (including the Night Circus) plus Beowulf. I sometimes forget how fast I can read when I allow myself blocks of uninterrupted time. We had a fire every evening. We listened to football games on AM radio (we couldn't even pull in NPR). In the past, we've played games. 

The park encompasses some of the best natural coastal complexes I've seen in Florida with white sand beaches backed by 20-30 foot dunes covered with a variety of native vegetation, including tons of sea oats. In late November, that also meant colorful fields of wildflowers in yellow (woody goldenrod?), white (salt myrtle), lavender (Texas sage? a native mint?) and red (holly berries). The wilderness area, which you now need to register with the rangers to enter, has a trail that runs seven and half miles out to the point. That's pretty much a full day. I think we've only ever made it four. For more ambitious people, there are wilderness campsites along the trail (the picture above is the view of the bay from wilderness campsite 3). The sunsets over the Gulf can be spectacular. On previous visits we've seen green flashes. And the nights are dark, dark, dark. As dark as either of us has seen with the exception of being at sea. With no real light pollution, the constellations and the Milky Way pop right out.

On the fauna side, we saw deer, bald eagles, hawks, osprey, herons, egrets, rays, and dolphin. We heard an owl hooting a couple nights in the nearby woods. On one of the windier days, we saw several herons and egrets perched high up in the pines. On our way to sunset one evening, we stumbled across a bobcat on the dunes, only the second I've ever seen in the wild. He quickly disappeared. We saw a kingfisher sitting on a wire overlooking the bay and a salt marsh. We've seen either him or his ancestors in that same spot each time we've visited. On the boardwalk by the bay, we watched several bald eagles calling, and one pair fighting. Another turned his head and banked to check us out more closely when he heard Karen's camera. I've never seen one do that. On the trail, we saw bobcat tracks and what we later learned were coyote tracks. On our last morning, I heard five deer chuffing a warning at a stand of trees beyond the porch. When we walked down to the beach, we saw more coyote tracks deerstalking. I assume he was the object of their ire. 

We drove home on Thanksgiving Eve, relaxed and detoxed in a way only slowing down and immersing ourselves in nature can for us. Unfortunately, we didn't encounter any roadside honey stands. On the last trip, we picked up two quarts of tupelo very cheap. The drive takes us through some of the poorest counties in Florida (including the poorest school district with only a single K-12 school). I think seeing so many burned-out, abandoned buildings is sometimes the most depressing part of the trip. There are days I dream of living in a more rural area that has more green to get some distance from our neighbors. Then I remember what the day-to-day reality of that looks like and think, maybe home is not so bad. 

Find more of Karen's pictures on Flickr (she plans to add more as she gets time). 

© 2013 Edward P. Morgan III

Samhain 2013

Samhain 2013 - a reading (on YouTube)

Towering trees guard the ancient ruins where gods once wept. Only blind men dwell there now, unscathed by its leprous beauty. Wispy, white clouds fly like victory pennants on an azure field. Bushy tendrils of Spanish moss sway in the slightest breeze, swinging like the beards of old, gray men dancing in the trees. From his high presbyterian perch, an osprey dines in silence, dropping piscine morsels onto the congregational steps below.

Soft lavender twilight deepens to indigo as pinpoints of light wink to life and a few become unstable, blazing fiery trails to earth. The night flashes to life, briefly revealing a glimpse of the world beyond the darkened window before settling back to a pale reflection of within. A flickering flame describes an imperfect circle around which tongues of shadow dance and press but dare not enter.

The moon plays hide and seek among the clouds, its light occasionally spilling forth like cream overflowing a pewter pitcher, her light a sparkling, sunlit memory adrift on an otherwise cloud-strewn and stormy sea. Still and unmoving in the silence of the cauldron, water sleeps content in the beauty of her reflection, capturing her in unnatural slumber.

© 2013 Edward P. Morgan III