For My Birthday

September 16, 1943: An Update

In another year on my birthday, I might have thought about some object that I have been craving. On a trip to Denver at the end of July, I bought the Native American burl bowl with which I’ve been mildly obsessed for the last year or so. It was expensive, and I do love it. This too will pass. As I search my mind, I can’t think of anything that I feel I must have.

So, for my 66th birthday, I am happy just to have a few things that maybe we take for granted. Today, I’m celebrating by burning the brush pile in the cow trap to the east of my barn house—a pile that has been accumulating for the last year because of constant burn bans in these days of constant drought. The lovely, lovely rains that have visited us over the last several days have brought an end to the burn ban temporarily, at least.

And for my birthday, I am happy to have finally caught with my digital camera a butterfly, this one a Tiger Swallowtail, in my garden. Feeding on a bluish-purple Duranta, one of several happy bloomers in this erstwhile water-starved garden, following life-restoring rains, along with Maggie among the roses, Turk’s Cap, Hamelia, Salvias Greggii and Coccinea, Society Garlic, Althea, Rose Mallow, and Peruvian Pavonia—all celebrating, their faces surely smiling just for my special day.

I would wish for one more thing on my birthday, that my left foot, plagued with tendonitis since a May hiking incident at Big Tesuque in the mountains near my high desert home, would go ahead and get over itself. After several sessions of physical therapy, and now x-rays that showed nothing except a little arthritis resulting from age—okay, I’m 66 today—it’s still ouching day in and day out. Its complaints go naturally with a cranky back that wants a visit to the chiropractor. And I won’t go into the daily regimen of pills—although relatively light compared to some and yet my envy by comparison of a few others I know. I’m doing okay.

And today, my oldest sister, Joan, is taking our neighbors and me to the buffet at the Chinese restaurant in nearby Madisonville. How fortunate we are to have Asian on the table in a town of less than 5000 residents, a community that otherwise boasts at least five Tex-Mex eateries, yet to my knowledge, nothing that’s just plain old American. I guess the friend in Santa Fe who told me earlier in the summer that I have a sweet life was right on the money. Sisters who care about me and miss me when I’m away for most of the year, friends who call to say “Happy Birthday”, one from as far away as a South Carolina vacation, early autumn blooms and butterflies, a paid-for home that will always be here—“unless I burn it down today,” he considers, grinning. Life is good.

For My Birthday—Normangee, Texas (September 16, 2009)
R. Harold Hollis