Change

Nearly every day, I drive down a particular road to reach my home, Perrowville. We pronounce it "pear-a-vil" here in our Southern parts, but that's kind of beside the point of this story. Toward the end of this road, before I make the right-hand turn onto Coffee, which is "my" road, our Pearavil tops a slight hill and makes a gentle curve around to the right, and a driveway springs up on the left. Fields, which usually lay pale and fallow without so much as a cow to dot their expanse, fold out on either side of the drive, lined along the road by black board fence. The drive itself travels back into the depths of the fields until no longer visible, the house hidden from sight by a distant treeline.

There was, until fairly recently, a lovely old cherry tree on the left-hand side of the driveway, and a low, whitewashed brick wall that curved along either side in invitation. The tree budded in spring, its gnarled old branches curving low and heavy over the wooden slats of the fence and asphalt, and turned pink and riotous quickly thereafter. It was was thick and green in summer, and shed beautiful burnished tears in fall. In winter it was a skeletal and oddly elemental part of the landscape, the branches twisted and reaching out, it seemed, to say hello as I drove past.

The wall was its companion. Some of the bricks were loose and unmortared, crumbling in places. The base was no longer fresh and white but stained with dirt and age. They were a picture--the wall, the tree, the drive, the fence--a snapshot I framed in my mind each and every time I topped that swell and drove past that residence.

Until recently. It happened in stages. First, the tree. I came home one day and it was gone. Not even a stump to mark its passing. I felt an almost physical pain at its passing. Next, the wall. The wall took a little longer. It was removed first from one side of the driveway, and then, several days later, the opposite. Neat scars of red dirt where once the wall had rested--tombstones in reverse, I remember thinking.

Around a month or so later, construction began on pillars. I've been watching their progress with interest. They're mostly up now--a stucco-look, with iron protruding, I suppose for some sort of gate that may eventually be erected. There are plates inset, with the name of the farm inscribed.

They're pretty. They bespeak wealth, and class.

But they're not an elegant, elemental old cherry tree, and a wall that has witnessed thousands of passers-by. I miss them.

Christmas, in January

I made a promise this year…

That promise was NOT to take down any of my Christmas decorations or the tree until it snowed.

To me, it seems that Christmas and snow are synonymous; snow is the proverbial icing on the cake when it comes to Christmas. It’s the glittery star placed on the pinnacle of the tree. Snow is the marshmallows floating in a cup of steamy hot chocolate.

Unfortunate for this holiday, there wasn’t any icing, glittery stars, or marshmallow froth.

To be honest, it was kind of a letdown.

However, when I awoke this morning, I had a migraine. It wasn’t yet light out, and I stumbled downstairs for some new medication that I got from my neurologist yesterday afternoon. When I got to the kitchen, I glanced out the window to see that it was lighter than it should have been at this early hour.

I drew in a gasp of wonder.

Crystalline flakes were drifting from the skies, and the park behind my house was laid out before me, beneath a blanket of snowy white.

I watched the snow for a few moments and felt a smile creep up my cheeks.

I ignited the lights on my Christmas tree, and I sat in my living room with a slew of music from the holidays wafting about the house.

And so this morning I share the photo I captured, and a playlist of Christmas music just for you.

Merry Christmas…but better late than not at all.

  

Love That Kid

Here's what I've been up to the past six months...his name is Truitt:



Although I certainly didn't intend for it to happen in quite this fashion, he's kind of taken over our lives. It's All Things Truitt here in the White House.



And that's okay, because we've managed to journey from the hellish land of colic to a veritable funhouse. Truitt is a jolly baby, most of the time, which is fabulous because it helps the fact that he refuses to sleep during the day.

He has just started his attempts at crawling, which are hilarious to watch.



Who can resist a bear on the bootie? Not me.



In all seriousness, we've been busy. To give you the short version of the past six months:
--Truitt arrived.
--He cried.
--He puked.
--I did massive amounts of laundry.
--He cried some more.
--He puked some more.
--I washed more clothes.
--He cut some teeth.
--He stopped crying when he received his share of magic fairy dust.
--He started to chortle at the dog.
--And recently he started trying to crawl.


That's pretty much it. And, oh--he believes he can fly. He believes he can touch the sky.

It's Been A While

I logged onto Blogger and was given a quiet reminder that I had another site.

This site.

Ah life, with its intricacies, business, and all of the things that make it what it is. I guess it’s safe to say that with my job, my photography, and the myriad of everything else, Four Perspectives has taken somewhat of a backseat in my life lately.

…oh, it’s still here, it just now sits on the proverbial back burner of all the things I need to do and accomplish, never seeming to be that pot I notice to be boiling over and in the need of the most attention.

When I saw that the last post on this site was a month ago—mine being back on September 1st—I was thinking that something most certainly needed to be done about this.

And so I am.

I awoke this morning with a feeling that autumn has now kicked into full swing, and it’s always at this time of year I’m given a reminder of what life is—what it could be—and what it isn’t. It’s a changing of the guard and movement into a holiday adorned with rich colors and a season festooned with a chill in the air and heaps of leaves to wade in up to your ankles or knees.

I love this time of year…I long for it like oxygen, but I don’t wish for the long, cold of winter to be here. I would wish for the fall season to last a little bit longer though and give me the world adorned in her best fashions.

In honor of this, I wanted to build you a list of tunes for the season…list of music to share the feeling of wonderment that I do at this time, but unfortunately, the songs were not available on Playlist for a readily made alliance of awesome. To remedy this, I decided to upload a few tunes to my server and link them in, but I soon found that the songs I linked had already been blocked due to copyright restrictions.

Oh, my friends…for this I apologize.

So for you I had an autumn playlist, which should have filled beyond brimming with forty to fifty songs, but instead has only about ten. This is unfortunate because I felt that these captured something about the season…that magic and feeling autumn brings; after all, you probably know that there’s not too many autumn carols out there.

Because I can only I give you what I can in the playlist, I will tell you the names of those which I cannot give.

Deal?

Happy autumn, and Happy closing of the year.

- Teachinfourth

  

This Time of Year - John McCutcheon
The Silver Run - John McCutcheon
Is My Family - John McCutcheon
Soup - John McCutcheon
Wintersong - John McCutcheon
Waiting for Snow - John McCutcheon
Mending Fences - John McCutcheon
Closing the Bookstore - John McCutcheon
When Fall Comes to New England - Cheryl Wheeler
If These Walls Could Speak - Amy Grant
Let it Fall - Sean Watkins
When You Come Back Down - Nickel Creek
See Right Through You - Jerrytown
River - Joni Mitchell
Southbound Train - Julie Gold
Island of Time - Patty Larkin
I Have a Song - Lucy Simon
Sweet Baby James - James Taylor
You've Got a Friend - James Taylor
Copperline - James Taylor
Song for You far Away - James Taylor
What About - Peter Breinholt
Teeming Autumn - David Tolk
Autumn Road - David Tolk
Holocene (edited) - Bon Iver
Can't Find My Way Home - Blind Faith
Set the World on Fire - Britt Nicole
You've Got a Friend - James Taylor

A Fancy or a Feeling?

If there were no God, there would be no Atheists. ~G.K. Chesterton

So I was talking to a friend the other day about God.

This friend is kind of wishy-washy about religion and actually professes to be leaning towards atheism. By the way, this friend was not Teachinfourth – just in case ya'll were wondering after his searching for God post awhile back -although we have spent a fair amount of time sorting through faith,belief and other such ethereal topics. Anyway this mostly atheist friend was trying to explain why believing in God just doesn’t make any sense to him. He believes that people just use God as an excuse to explain whatever coincidence they want to explain. He is an atheist on logical grounds – there is just no proof that God isn’t just a figment of mankind’s imagination.

I have to say that he is right. Believing in God is entirely illogical…and I like to think that I’m a pretty logical person.

But I believe in God anyway.

Now, I do not have a perfect faith, but I do believe there is a God and that there is a plan.

I was trying explain my faith as we were talking and I hit upon this analogy. Of course I didn’t think of this analogy until the day after our conversation…it would have been much cooler and more satisfying if I could have formed this argument in the moment of debate…but whatever.

Here’s what I think…

Belief in God is all about feeling and intuition in the same way that being a parent is all about feeling and intuition.

I mean, when you have a new baby there are times when you simply don’t know what it wants. You’ve fed it, changed it, burped it, rocked it, sung to it, and the baby is still crying. Because you hopefully want to be a good parent (and because you really want to get some sleep), you keep trying to figure out what your baby wants. Through trial and error you slooooowwwwly come to recognize the signals that your baby is throwing out there. You can tell the hungry cry from the cranky cry. You can tell the “I’m just throwing a fit” cry from the “something is really wrong” cry.

Now to anybody else a baby crying is just a baby crying - could mean anything or could mean nothing. But to you, the parent who has spent hours and hours and days and years studying this child, that cry means something…something specific.

Can you prove it?

Well…maybe not.

But you know what you know and you feel what you feel whether it’s logical or not.

Believing in God is a quest. A quest for a feeling that helps you find answers to questions that, like your baby's cry, only you might understand. It takes a lot of time and a lot of practice but eventually, slowly, you start to recognize the signs...and then maybe even start to sleep through the night.