And it broke after the hurricane hit south, hit people I knew. In the vacuum, cold, cold air sweeping away the hot summer that at times we thought would not end, the heat in the earth and the sun was just too much. Then the aftermath.
I drove to South Georgia to cut up trees that had been upturned and twisted at the rot. One tree knifed a branch through the roof of my father’s house. Other branches fell their way on top of his pottery studio. So many branches—those on the fence line, those in the drive, everything covered in a quiet layer of needle and leaf, everything smelling of pine.
Now, back home in Alabama, we have a fire going in vestal to push the chill out of the cabin. I’m on the deck where the wood smoke catches in the wind and falls to me, where a cloud slips its shadow over Cherty Ridge not too far away where the leaves are beginning to turn. The hickory, the one close-in and bowed at the cabin, tells time this way—nuts slipping through leaves, cracking on the deck, the roof, and rolling to the ground.
There were things I saw on the highway driving south. A wrench that came off the side of a gas truck outside Carrollton. I jerked the wheel and the wrench bounced off the pavement, held in the air just above forever until I could not tell if I was moving at all. To be in motion and at a standstill—I knew then time had shifted. But I didn’t and still don’t know what to do about it.
Past Perry, the hurricane ripped billboard signs into flags. Days later, when I sped home to Hydrangea, there was a ribbon of plastic twisted across the interstate freed from its cargo. And again I was standing still in motion.
Before there was electricity, there were stars in the trees—hundred-year old pines that should never come down. But one did in front of the pottery studio. When my friend Jim showed up to help saw it, at the core we found lightered wood. The logs began to bleed rosin from the cuts as the day warmed, but no rosin came from that lightered.
It was, reminded me of the eclipse Tina and I saw in Algood, Tennessee, when the moon made its way to the center of the sun and there was the black round and the bright along the edges flaring. We saw that in the sky with no glasses to shield us from burning. I saw that in the pine.