Letter from Over the Rhine

We had such rosy light on the farm this Good Friday evening. There was beautiful light on the old farmhouse stairway. Open a kitchen cupboard door, and there it was inside. Walk into the dining room and all over the walls, a patchwork quilt of glowing warmth that had traveled light-years to arrive in a little farmhouse in Ohio.

I was thinking to myself earlier that it was the first calm day we had had in awhile. The wind had been quite fierce all week, relentless even. But the world was becoming still.

hen (and Karin has written in beautiful detail about this as well) my wife witnessed what can only be described as the sound of a mighty rushing wind. A twister came into the maple grove and began knocking the branches of the trees together - a clattering. Leaves began to swirl on the floor of the woods and spiral upward into the sky. Karin called quite urgently for me to come look and by the time I got there, leaves were funneling up 100, 200, 300 feet into the air and higher, drifting away to who knows where.

We took a walk with the dogs around the edge of the field and Karin spotted one - no two! - blue herons flying at quite a distance, wending their way south from a distant creek. She beckoned to them as she often does and they changed course and flew over toward us. In the most languid manner, they began circling above us for two or three minutes, what seemed a lifetime. A strange blessing bestowed, and not easy to hold back tears.

Today the farm feels like a thin place. The veil fraying between the seen and unseen.

Or was it a small tornado? It was a funnel. (It was the second chapter of Acts, it was the Holy Spirit, it was just there...) Suddenly out of nowhere at 5:30 in the afternoon on Good Friday, the sound of tree limbs smacking and cracking against each other.

And I looked up and out across the yard into the maple grove adjacent to the house, tree limbs were clattering and there was a clearly demarcated funnel of dead leaves being siphoned up off of the woodlot floor and they were being pulled up in a funnel cloud, up and up, higher and higher and it was noisy. It was startling. It was not subtle.

I started calling - no, yelling for Linford who just arrived home. I wanted him to hurry! Drop everything and come and see this thing that just dropped out of the cold cloudy gray sky without warning, without rain, without wind ~ was nothing into something ~ just a funnel of dead autumn leaves being sucked up into the March sky...

Up and over the house and then up, up above the house and finally so far up into the sky we could barely see them ~ and this went on for minutes.

In our shock we tried to name it. Because that's what we do.

And then when we couldn't quite, we gathered ourselves and decided to go for a walk with the dogs. So out into the woodlot we went to see if there was any trace of what we thought we'd seen.

There it was ~ a path and then a circular spot where you could see the leaves had been pulled up off the ground into the sky.

Evidence.

We kept on walking for a while on the same path that we walk every day and at about 6 o'clock I looked up and out across the farmer's still barren field behind our property to the east and I saw a great blue heron flying out across the field from the creek headed southwest.

Naturally I called to it because that's what I always do.

Then I saw the second heron and they saw us too. Two lanky humans and two large dogs standing, our mouths agape (in awe or panting) looking up at them.

They flew TO us.

And then they circled us. And they circled again and called out, and they circled and circled ~ so long I was able to fumble for my phone with my one untethered, unleashed hand and record their movements as they went higher and higher, around and around like a funnel cloud in the sky above us.

It was a Totem. It was a sign and a wonder. I was Dorothy torn between Kansas and Oz. It was a mysterious wind and it was what it was. It was moving. It was comforting. It was Good. It was Good Friday.
3.25.16
~k