Despite being reared in an age of great scientific and technological discovery, I have always believed that walking into a breeze or looking up at the stars trumps the laboratory explanations for their being. That idea was reinforced in me again a few nights ago.
I am a walker, not at the mall or on the local high school track, but along our country road; I have written of that place often in this space. My wife, when she is not pedaling her bicycle along that same sliver of blacktop, most often joins me.
We do not dodder; we really pick them up and put them down as we race the sun.
But on an evening last week when she was typically working late at cleaning up the messes her elementary school library visitors had left for her, I struck out from our back step to walk into what was left of a gorgeous day, most of which we had spent behind the wheel of our car.
I knew the walk would help me work the kinks out of my back, but I felt that, even more, I needed to work a few out of my head, too. Most of us live in a noisy world; I fear we, as a species, have begun to fear hearing too little rather than too much. A typical downtown street corner usually blasts it pedestrians with 70 decibels or more of roar. Ratchet that up a few notches higher when adding trains and obnoxious car stereos.
We may be beginning to fear quietude, and, unfortunately, many people now link it to inactivity and idleness and boredom. I am concerned that fewer and fewer of us want to listen to the wind and to the skitter of corn leaves or to the chorus of fall’s last bugs. Just yesterday, it was the annoying drone of motorbikes and four-wheelers that I heard over the gentler sounds of our countryside.
Anyway, on that night, I laced my shoes, grabbed our Black Cat nightlight and an apple to help my stomach get through to suppertime, and took off with schedules and appointments and obligations on my mind. But within a quarter of a mile, I caught a scent of smoke in the air. It wasn’t from someone’s smoldering leaf pile or trash barrel or fencerow clearing; it was coal smoke, and the trace of it in the breeze soon had me sniffing the air near my grandparents’ house 40 years ago. They heated with coal, and it wasn’t odd at all to hear a huge truck loaded with the stuff ramble up their drive to dump its glistening black cargo into a basement doorway that led into a dark and lifeless room under their house.
Shoveling coal into their furnace is a great memory for me, as was the welcoming heat of their house after a walk up the drive to their place in January, but it was the scent that the coal gave off as its smoke wafted into the breeze through their cinderblock chimney that I recall the most.
Then, for the first time that night, I noticed how soft the evening breeze was as it touched my face. It was a kind wind, air that was so much more pleasant than the bitter slap that will greet us on our walks a month from now. It made me glad that I had forgotten my old khaki-colored ball cap as it sifted through my hair and moved the creaking stalks of uncut corn and skipped turkey oak leaves along the pavement with a scratch.
After I’d made my turn to head homeward and away from a sunset that had been painted in a color I have decided to call “Dreamsicle Orange,” I walked into a place where the woods reach out to border the road, a spot where I actually had to turn on my light to see, as well as to be seen by oncoming cars. The cool of that dip in the road had me zipping my sweatshirt up to my neck, and I walked with an odd, hunchbacked gate since my hands, including the one that held the flashlight, minus a finger or two, were stuffed into the pockets of my blue jeans.
As I hustled along, straining to listen for cars, I heard something — apparently startled by my scuffling shoes — crash through the woods, luckily away from where I was. It was probably a deer — they are on the move in herds right now — but it just as easily could have been a coyote. Whatever it was, I was happy to emerge into the pale light at the top of the rise. The incident had not startled me enough to find the need to whistle the rest of the way home, but it did make me realize that I was out of my element now that the sun was down. My eyes simply do not work as well as those that were undoubtedly trained on me from the shorn soybean fields and tree limbs I walked past.
I had saved my apple for the return trip, and so I pulled it out of a jacket pocket. I had bought a big bag of them — Fuijis, I think — from an orchard down the road from us, a place that I thoroughly enjoy visiting for its wonderful scent alone. It is a mixture of fruit and cider and earth. I crunched my way through a good half-mile or so before I tossed the stripped core into a ditch, and I realized that, because of its taste, I had apparently not tried very hard to keep the juice from dripping down my chin.
I have heard that as we age our senses grow dull, that the years rob us of sounds and flavors and fine print and the scents of our kitchens. I have had to explain for years that my own poor hearing was the direct result of a fever-filled weeklong illness before I ever went to school, and that well before I reached the age I am now, I began to grow accustomed to losing both music and conversation to a monotonous hum that is always with me.
The great astronomer Edwin Hubble once wrote, “Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him, and that adventure is called Science.”
I didn’t feel like a scientist on my walk into the breeze the other night. With my four-and-a half senses at work, I did feel like an explorer, though.
You can e-mail Mike at hickory913@aol.com and can write to him c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. He will be reading from and signing his second book, “Sidelines: the Best of the Basketball Stories…,” at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Rockville Public Library. Visit Mike’s Web page at www.mikelunsford.com.
Mike Lunsford
The Off Season: A night spent exploring the universe
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
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THE OFF SEASON: Craning to see elegance in flight
Just before midnight last night, spring officially slipped quietly into our back yards, but I doubt that any of us noticed it much this morning as we slurped our coffee or downed our eggs over this newspaper.
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The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped. Already, I have the overflow stacked on the floor and shoved into the spaces where previous tenants once lived. Gradually, expediency is replacing order, so fiction and non-fiction, biographies and novels, are scandalously co-mingling on my shelves.
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THE OFF SEASON: The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped.
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THE OFF SEASON: It’s taken long time to say thanks…
It was with a cup of coffee and a newspaper in my hands a few Mondays ago that I discovered that Mr. Hapenny had died.
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THE OFF SEASON: Lessons learned from the night the ice fell
The picture window of my cabin is sealed in a perfect glaze of ice as I write this, last Thursday morning, and since it faces due north and sees little direct sunlight, I imagine I will be looking through this shower door glass of mine for a few more days. But since I sit and watch the woods much of the time, instead of writing, I suppose the ice is serving a rare good purpose in keeping me on task.
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The Off Season: Pass a ‘midnight dreary’ with The Big Read
It was a pretty poor excuse for an evening one night last week as I lay beside our glowing fireplace, a pillow propped behind my head. I was spending some time with my current read, enjoying each page in the semi-darkness, smug in the knowledge that I’d not be heading to my classroom the next day.
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The Off Season: ‘Too old and too lazy’ to deal with coyotes
Despite the cold and the ever-present winter breezes that blow across our hill these days, I often find myself, even in the blue evenings, standing on the walk near my cabin, looking at the stars or watching for the last red-tailed hawks of the day as they float by in the drafts.
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The Off Season: The passion of having a passion is a great thing
It just occurred to me that I am fortunate to have a passion — a drive to do something that takes me away from the clutches of my job, of home repairs, of the mundane and the ho-hum.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
Raw Video: Kim Jong Il Statue Unveiled
Raw Video: Biden Greets Chinese VP for Visit
Trial Opens for Ala. Man in Bride's Diving Death
Authorities: Houston Found Underwater in Tub
Baltimore's 'Crime Stopper' Is a Basketball Star
Raw Video: Hearse Arrives at N.J. Funeral Home
Arm Wrestler Not Guilty Plea in Wife's Death
Raw Video: Houston Body Flown From L.A. to N.J.
Bacteria Keep Swimmers Off Some Fla. Beaches
Raw Video: 5 People Injured in Bangkok Blasts
First Person: Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show
Raw Video: Whitney Houston's Last Performance
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Police: Houston Found Under Water, Unconscious
Israeli Diplomats Targeted in India, Georgia
Obama's New Budget: The Winners and Losers
ShowBiz Minute: Houston, Grammys, BAFTAs
Attempted Bomb Attack Stopped in Georgia
Sandusky Can See Grandkids, Have Local Jury
Gregoire: Marriage Equality Is Right for Wash.
Watch: Whitney Houston's Golden Hearse
Kate Upton MLB 2K12 Commercial
Olympic Swimmer Proposes on Podium After Big Win
Scarlett Johansson's Bikini P-D-A
Man Allegedly Drowns Wife While Scuba Diving
Sports Illustrated Cover Leaked
Wash. becomes 7th state to okay same-sex marriage
Romijn's 60 Pound Weight Loss
The 'Celebrity Apprentice' Cast Meets Donald Trump
Kissing contest heats up
Hugh Hefner's Son Arrested
Jacqueline Kennedy's personal papers released
Did Tyler Perry Have a Secret Wedding?
Iran denies Israeli embassy bombings
'Bachelor' Free Falls into the Ocean
Facebook Parenting: Father Posts Video Responding to Daughter's Post
Bobby Brown on Houston's Death
