Southverve

It is cool this morning, but shouldn’t be. Cool mornings don’t happen in South Georgia until late September. It is still August, but the Atlantic storms have gone west and northeast. What has been left in the vacuum, a dry wind sluicing down from Canada.

And it is beautiful here – the trees, the expanse of sky and land – but in summers the weather is so hot and the humidity so sticky, that it’s difficult to enjoy. You have to hurry through the landscape. This morning with my run over, I’m walking the field road that turns by the cotton my brother planted in spring. The cotton is blooming now. The road leads to an irrigation pond and in the dry breeze, in the coolness, something unexpected happens – the beauty of this place becomes sharper and lingers.

As if to make the point, out on the pond, in the center, perched on a dead limb, is a crane. Its gray wings are striped white and black and spread out to catch the wind. Its long neck is hooked outward as it makes a deep caw. It, too, cannot believe this morning, and like me wants the wind to rush down in wave after wave.

I walk on the bank, then out to the short dock, then by the red-green lilies and into a pasture where I want to move the town’s old depot and restore it. At the moment, the depot sits in another field on my father’s property. I size up the spot the house will eventually be, then back to the pond with its stand of sycamores and pines.

Out on the pond now, the sun bends the current, blinds me. Not like the quick flash of lightning. The reflection here is unending and I have to close my eyes. I don’t want to. Don’t want to walk home like you wouldn’t if you found by accident, a place and a moment this full of life.