Over the Transom

by Sonny Brewer

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The Red and the Green of the Season

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Bobby’s hanging back there in the distance, at ease with the guarding oak at the trail’s head.

All along the whole of the Gulf of Mexico’s coastal crescent from New Orleans to Apalachicola, we’ve got live oaks. They are plentiful and squat the land, low and broad, with their gnarly twisted trunks and furrowed bark like the hide of some ancient thunderous beast.

They grow easily and the grandfathers and grandmothers of the live oaks spread their canopies wider than houses. Many of them have trunks the size of whole rooms. They are the Druidic royalty of of the backwood landscape and even guard bronze plaques in Southern city parks.

They are regal in their bearing, these live oak trees, and the rough-barked limbs of the mightiest of them droop under their own weight, and dip close to the ground at two-thirds their hundred-foot reach. And the ends of those branches turn up toward the sky like the palms of some conjuring sorcerer, bedecked in sleeves of green resurrection ferns that get crispy brown and look dead until some rain comes.*

Walking down by Weeks Bay with my little dog, taking a brisk jaunt on a chilly afternoon a week from Christmas, I spy on a live oak’s branches the bright red lichen that so often decorates their burly arms. And I’m reminded of Helen’s comment on a recent post: “The red lichen growing next to resurrection fern is the best dressing of this season.”

And the live oak itself, through all the changing seasons, and even centuries for some of them, retains its leaves in green evidence of enduring life. Like the living words of the Gospel message that still holds on through seasons of upheaval and confusion.

Helen’s right. The red and the green—crucifixion and resurrection, the plot and storied final pages of our teacher Jesus, that opened with a heralded birth still celebrated two thousand years later. The season’s blessing to us all.

Red lichen, green ferns.

 

98

Stout and sure live oak
sailing ships’ stems ribs futtocks—
mangers and crosses

 

*The words in the first three paragraphs here are after those on pages of my novel, The Widow and the Tree. Signed first editions of the book are available at Page & Palette Bookstore in lovely downtown Fairhope, Alabama.

 

PS: One last find on our walk. If you squint your eyes just so, the white lichen can look like teeny tiny snowflakes on this red leaf. Or maybe it’s just Merry Christmas in my eyes.

 

 

Narrow Fellow I Never Knew Before

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“No shoes? So what, I got you beat. So, let’s move out.”

I knew this little cold snap was on its way, so me and my little dog Bobby, we took my bare feet walking in the warm on Monday. There’s a trail through the piney woods down at Weeks Bay, and I know it’s foot friendly for feet without the callouses of a real barefoot man. Like Henry Stuart who I wrote about in my novel The Poet of Tolstoy Park, he took off his Wellington boots and left them off for more than twenty years.

For a couple of hours Monday, I left my shoes at home. Kind of a weird feeling to be in the car going someplace with not a pair of shoes, not even hidden away in the back. Just in case, you know. But there we were. And it was, after all, worth the risk of a briar in my toe.

Mother Nature appreciated a man showing up shoeless and laid out a surprise for me. Showed me a creature I’ve never seen before, but one that’s live hereabouts for all my years.

I almost stepped on it. And I might have had I not been watching ahead in the pine needles with a little more attention for my footfalls. When I saw it, there was that instinctual “zero at the bone” Emily Dickinson said she felt when she would meet a “narrow fellow in the grass.” I thought it was a snake.

When my marrow came back to 98.6, I discerned it was not a venomous snake. Still, it was not a snake I’d ever seen. So I got closer, bent way down to look it in the eye. I reached for my trusty picture-taking pocket telephone. And not only will it behave like a camera, it’ll also go into some odd cyber mode and tell me what I’m taking a picture of. Google with a lens.

To clobber or not to clobber, that’s not really the question. 

The image on the screen was animated by little winking dots for half a minute, then it shifted to a new Outdoor Alabama screen that let me know I was looking not at a snake at all. I was seeing an older adult Eastern Glass Lizard. A grandparent of these piney woods. I was honored to make the acquaintance.

Here, I’ll just let you read over my shoulder:

DESCRIPTION: The eastern glass lizard, Ophisaurus ventralis, is a legless lizard that can reach lengths of 42 inches. [Ours is that long.] Of that, the head and body can reach a maximum length of 12 inches. An old adult may be greenish above and yellow below. [Ours is that color.] It is the only glass lizard that may look green. They are easily misidentified as snakes, but have movable eyelids and external ear openings [And a handsome face]…They are stiff to the touch and like other lizards the tail breaks off easily [I might’ve freaked out]. The tail is quickly regenerated and is usually lighter in color… When handling a glass lizard, one should grab the body of the lizard firmly, not far behind the head to avoid being bit [okay, so it bites, and I would’ve freaked out], and lightly grasping the tail to avoid breakage.

Not even any need to look for round pupils.

 

PS: Bobby stepped right over the glass lizard and didn’t even see it. His country kin, those squirrel dogs in Pickens County, would be embarrassed for him. And I’m relieved and mighty glad it was not a copperhead!

 

 

Lucy In the Grass with Diamonds

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That look…

My little dog Bobby, without a collar or a leash, led me down the slope toward Waterhole Branch, between a thick water oak with branches akimbo and a skinny cypress, straight up like some arrow that dropped from the middle of the sky. Bobby doesn’t wander far ahead of me. Like he’s my keeper, bless his heart.

And if I dawdle, say, maybe stop to notice something, he’ll sometimes come to see what I’ve found. If I’m looking in the tree branches at a bird, or, like yesterday, some bright red lichen spattered on a twisted limb, he might also look up in the same direction. But sometimes he stops and eyeballs me, a look that asks, “Can we just keep it moving?”

Well, Bobby boy, just depends on what’s got my attention.

This morning, it was a sprinkling of clover at my feet. But what held me so captivated was how each clover leaf was adorned with a jeweled drop of dew. I got down on my knees. I put my palms on the ground and bent my face closer, arrested by the beauty of one certain clover, like an elegant lady dressed up in a holy trinity of her finest diamonds.

Bobby came to see, but I pushed his face away in case he got a mind to give a lick and spoil my find. I went back to the cabin for my iPhone, and a picture. Then, tonight in the dark with a flashlight, it seemed at first that all the clover had disappeared. A closer look and I was surprised to learn something new. Clover sleeps at night with its leaves tucked to its stem. How did a country boy get to this age and never have discovered that?

In gratitude, I reciprocate with seventeen syllables.

 

 

Clover sleeps at night
folds three leaves down to her side
stars fall, morning dew

 

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