My Soaring Heart

There are so many things that I haven’t written about. Most things really. I’ve not even begun to scratch the surface. These days I’ve been feeling that more and more of the artifice surrounding me has been falling off, peeling away. I feel like I’ve always been fairly self-aware but lately I feel like I am truly beginning to find myself. I guess it took me a good while to realize I was lost! For example on Friday nights this Autumn I would find myself on Dunns Road in Mercer County driving home from work and listening on the radio to the broadcast of Woodrow Wilson High School’s football games. That is the high school that both of my older sisters went to in Beckley, WV. It’s the school I would have attended had my family remained in WV. It’s the school where my childhood friends had their high school experiences and education. The same man calls the games on the radio that called them when I was a little boy. The Flying Eagles are still playing their home games at Van Meter Stadium in the neighborhood where I grew up. I remember attending every game with my parents because my oldest sister was a cheerleader. I remember my parents’ friends coming over on Friday nights and leaving their car at our house and all of us walking up to the game. I remember falling leaves and laughing. I remember the swarms of bats that would swoop around the enormous stadium lights. I remember playing under the bleachers. I remember shivering in the cold. I remember the halftime shows and walking to the concession stand and running into friends from school on the cinder track that encircled the playing field.

And I sat there in the seat of my truck churning up the mountainside listening to this man bring all of that back to me. And I mused about what my life might have been like had I remained in WV. And the past, my history, my myth skips by in my mind’s eye like a dream. Memories of being young, of being a teenager in Irmo, of being a young adult in Columbia, of being a married student in Vermont, of being a young chef in NM, the rise, the crash, the burn, the adventures, the sadness and joy, the failures and triumphs…

And I see my father’s smiling face as I drive. I hear his laugh. I remember him taking me down to the woods on one of those autumn game nights in Beckley when he presented me with my first gun, a .410 shotgun and feeling his arms wrap around me as we held the gun, pulled back the hammer and fired buckshot into the open field with twilight mountains looking on. I remember him waking me up early one Saturday morning for the first day of squirrel season and sitting in the passenger seat of his Bronco as he navigated the twists and turns of highway 19 towards the Farm. I remember stopping at Ray’s Bait and Tackle and buying shells. I remember sitting on the mountainside at the Farm and scanning the trees for fluffy tailed squirrels. I remember looking at my dad in his hunting gear, a Marlboro dangling from his lips.

In a moment I am there and then I am here. I am that boy and then I am this man. I am by his side looking up at him and then I am here, alone, just another man with his skull rattling with thoughts, images, emotions, memory, tides of electrical current coursing along my optic nerve.

And as lonesome as I get, as solitary as this life is that I’ve chosen for myself my heart still overflows with love, my wounded heart, my cracked and scarred heart, my empathetic heart, my heart aflame, passionate, wondrous, bewildered, never jaded, never cynical, my soaring heart, my grateful heart, my father’s heart, my son’s heart, my brother’s heart, my heart that rests in my chest but often longs to break free the bones, lift away from the flesh, my flying heart, love in the darkness, light and free, unburdened and rising, rising, rising…

December update

I’ve been living up here at The Farm for six months now. A bit of a milestone. Good point to look back and take stock. Things are going pretty well thus far. I’ve a lot to be thankful for. I haven’t written a blog in a good while it seems. Been busy with all kinds of projects and working at the resort and everything. The cabin is coming along. I’m doing as much as I can with the time and money I have available. The vision is very, very clear now as far as the cabin goes. It’s going to take some time to complete though. I have to prioritize. The most pressing projects are those that will make the cabin warmer. I installed a hardwood floor that is more for aesthetics than anything else though. I found the old floor depressing and I’ll be spending a lot of time indoors over the cold months so I decided to go ahead with its installation. The layout of cash wasn’t that big so it wasn’t a big deal. Cost me about $300 which seems like a bargain considering the warm, cozy ambiance it creates. The wood burning stove has been a huge success. I had to remove the electric heaters to install the flooring so the wood stove is the only source of heat right now and it’s working great. As long as I keep it burning of course! Burning a wood stove is a real craft. I’m getting better at it. When I lived here 15 years ago I had another wood stove that was a unit that fit into the fireplace and used the brick chimney as an exhaust. It worked well but didn’t put out near as much heat as the one I have now that sits out in the open room. As much work as I’ve done so far on winterizing the cabin there is still that much more to do. There are cracks and seams all over the place where cold air seeps in (and warm air creeps out.) The next phase is going to be installing the final 3 large picture windows on the front of the house and then putting up dry wall on the 3 walls of the main room and trimming the windows. These things will help a great deal in minimizing any air leaks. Somewhere in between I also need to either 1) fix the door jambs to the 2 outside doors so they are airtight or 2) replace the two outside doors with brand new doors with modern seals built in. I’m leaning to the latter. That will cost a pretty penny. I haven’t even priced doors yet. I’ve been reluctant to because I don’t want to get discouraged. And it will be somewhat of a project because I will have to demo out the door frames, widen them and build new frames for the doors to go into. (The current doors are not standard size.) So many things! The plumbing is still pretty crappy but I’m not going to bitch about it because at least the water is running and the hot water heater is working. I’ve decided to save up and hire someone to replace the entire septic tank system and redo the plumbing from the outside in. I’m also considering hooking on to the city water line which has now reached our property line high up on the mountainside. All these things need to get done before I can realistically move ahead with remodeling the kitchen and bathroom/bedroom.

With all these projects ahead of me it can sometimes get overwhelming. But I remind myself of how far I’ve come. Hell, I’ve already taken the biggest step of all and that was moving up here in the first damn place! I’m taking it all one day at a time, getting done what I can and not worrying too much about the pace of things. Ever since my father’s death in March the most important thing to me has been LIVING. Just showing up for my life everyday, counting my blessings, maintaining an awareness of the NOW, being present in my breath, my life, my moments. Because really…what else is there?