I should be working today, making sense out of some of the mess around this place, but it’s a cold, rainy day in rural east central Texas, and I’ve fired up my little woodstove for the first time this season. Fire and rain. This is the best weather for reading and napping, maybe some daydreaming. Often, when reminiscing with someone of my generation about some of the things nested in my memory, one installment from “Nancy and Sluggo” comes to mind. Her Aunt Fritzi had sent her to nap in this short tale. Not sleepy, though, Nancy knew of one sure-fired way to lullaby land—rain on the metal roof. So, she put her two-story dollhouse in the shower. The showers we’re having today are gently pelting my metal roof, a sound that I’ve missed while being in northern New Mexico, where rain is as rare as metal roofs in what some have called the adobe Disneyland. I’m not sleepy. Chicken-vegetable soup is simmering on the kitchen stove.
The landscape around the two-story barn I call home reflects the season. I’ve cut back all of the spent growth in the gardens. Only the roses await the magic date of Valentine’s Day, and the native yaupon so burdened with berries puzzles me a little. With all the birds hanging out around here, I would have expected the berries to have been plucked long ago. Not being a bird authority, I recognize only the obvious—crows, robins, cardinals, woodpeckers, sparrows. My neighbor named some more common to our area this time of year, like the nuthatch. The coralberry and American beautyberry, also native to this woodland area, are stripped of berry and bare of leaves, the birds having done their work I guess.
Sitting in the garden on any day, quietly, listening, a chorus of birds sounds continually. Ever so often I notice a downy woodpecker rat-a-tat-tatting, I guess in one of the Green Ash trees whose health is already compromised. Only the cardinals have insisted on making known their presence in my house. Upstairs in the loft a pair of French doors leads to a deck. A female cardinal has been flying against one of the doors for the last couple of days. I’m amazed that she hasn’t broken her neck, like the male cardinal did downstairs a couple of years back—same behavior, body-slamming so it seems into the French door entrance into the room I have called “the room” since adding it a few years ago. It’s where I keep my laptop and printer, most of my books on antiques and Texas history, a TV hooked up to the DISH, and lots of treasures that continue to tug at my heart in this year of decision, the year where I’m speaking about honoring my commitment to offer for sale “all my earthly possessions”.
In Santa Fe, as I make my way on foot around the downtown area, I am ceaselessly fascinated by the ravens, most especially the ones I hear perched in the large Pinon Pines on the state government office grounds. I can be intent on one direction, and at the KWOK-KWOK of the raven, I quickly change course, searching my pockets for my camera. The American crows common around here are not so arresting, but they are busy. “CAW-CAW,” they announce in flight from limb to wire. Occasionally they gather on the ground to forage for insects amongst spent Post Oak leaves, or the small beds of pine needles from the only two Pine trees that have survived in maturity on this place. We’re not quite far enough East for Pines to be native. This is the Post Oak Savannah, the 31-county region that spans northeast to southwest, from the Texas-Arkansas border, butting up against the Hill Country on the west as you head toward Austin and the Oak Prairie on the south as you make way toward the Gulf Coast. In most rural areas in the eastern two-thirds of Texas, the American crow is as common as dirt and as busy as a cranberry merchant in November. We don’t have much in the way of cranberry merchants in Texas, however.
The forecast is for the rain to dissipate by early afternoon today, but the temperature will hover in the low 40s under overcast skies. And I’m reminded of something I said a couple of years ago, in a winter that followed a typical hot, dry Texas summer that lingered into what we used to know as fall, not unlike the summer and fall just past. I was blessed to bask in true Fall, roaming my part of northern New Mexico, gasping at the show of golden Aspens and Cottonwoods. Now it’s January in Texas, and here’s what I want. I want a few cold, rainy days—cold enough that I crawl into a hot shower in the middle of the afternoon because I just can’t get warm. I want cold and rain that wraps around this house cocoon-like as I lay on the sofa upstairs in my loft, reading the best book I’ve ever read. I want to light the wood burning stove in the room where I keep my books and my laptop and hear the rain softly pummel the tin roof and blow against the French doors. And even though the price of propane disgusts me, I want cold weather, rainy days, winter thunder.
Fire and Rain—Normangee Texas (January 18, 2008)
R. Harold Hollis
The landscape around the two-story barn I call home reflects the season. I’ve cut back all of the spent growth in the gardens. Only the roses await the magic date of Valentine’s Day, and the native yaupon so burdened with berries puzzles me a little. With all the birds hanging out around here, I would have expected the berries to have been plucked long ago. Not being a bird authority, I recognize only the obvious—crows, robins, cardinals, woodpeckers, sparrows. My neighbor named some more common to our area this time of year, like the nuthatch. The coralberry and American beautyberry, also native to this woodland area, are stripped of berry and bare of leaves, the birds having done their work I guess.
Sitting in the garden on any day, quietly, listening, a chorus of birds sounds continually. Ever so often I notice a downy woodpecker rat-a-tat-tatting, I guess in one of the Green Ash trees whose health is already compromised. Only the cardinals have insisted on making known their presence in my house. Upstairs in the loft a pair of French doors leads to a deck. A female cardinal has been flying against one of the doors for the last couple of days. I’m amazed that she hasn’t broken her neck, like the male cardinal did downstairs a couple of years back—same behavior, body-slamming so it seems into the French door entrance into the room I have called “the room” since adding it a few years ago. It’s where I keep my laptop and printer, most of my books on antiques and Texas history, a TV hooked up to the DISH, and lots of treasures that continue to tug at my heart in this year of decision, the year where I’m speaking about honoring my commitment to offer for sale “all my earthly possessions”.
In Santa Fe, as I make my way on foot around the downtown area, I am ceaselessly fascinated by the ravens, most especially the ones I hear perched in the large Pinon Pines on the state government office grounds. I can be intent on one direction, and at the KWOK-KWOK of the raven, I quickly change course, searching my pockets for my camera. The American crows common around here are not so arresting, but they are busy. “CAW-CAW,” they announce in flight from limb to wire. Occasionally they gather on the ground to forage for insects amongst spent Post Oak leaves, or the small beds of pine needles from the only two Pine trees that have survived in maturity on this place. We’re not quite far enough East for Pines to be native. This is the Post Oak Savannah, the 31-county region that spans northeast to southwest, from the Texas-Arkansas border, butting up against the Hill Country on the west as you head toward Austin and the Oak Prairie on the south as you make way toward the Gulf Coast. In most rural areas in the eastern two-thirds of Texas, the American crow is as common as dirt and as busy as a cranberry merchant in November. We don’t have much in the way of cranberry merchants in Texas, however.
The forecast is for the rain to dissipate by early afternoon today, but the temperature will hover in the low 40s under overcast skies. And I’m reminded of something I said a couple of years ago, in a winter that followed a typical hot, dry Texas summer that lingered into what we used to know as fall, not unlike the summer and fall just past. I was blessed to bask in true Fall, roaming my part of northern New Mexico, gasping at the show of golden Aspens and Cottonwoods. Now it’s January in Texas, and here’s what I want. I want a few cold, rainy days—cold enough that I crawl into a hot shower in the middle of the afternoon because I just can’t get warm. I want cold and rain that wraps around this house cocoon-like as I lay on the sofa upstairs in my loft, reading the best book I’ve ever read. I want to light the wood burning stove in the room where I keep my books and my laptop and hear the rain softly pummel the tin roof and blow against the French doors. And even though the price of propane disgusts me, I want cold weather, rainy days, winter thunder.
Fire and Rain—Normangee Texas (January 18, 2008)
R. Harold Hollis
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