Imago Dei
Garden of Ogham
That morning, he rose, more certain that his recent ailments might not be lethal and terminal, after all.
For a moment, he puzzled over the interior design motifs of that ancient farmhouse.
Chaos, pure chaos, the sort that creeps up during short periods of enforced bachelorhood.
It was chilly that last Tuesday of March inside and out, and fumbling back into the recently bought blue jeans he had lain aside at bedtime the previous night, he grimaced that he’d left his sandals in the den.
Past the worn Bokhara rug, crossing the black and white formal floor tiles of his bedroom, across the narrow hallway plank pine and onto the white octagonal tile mosaic of the bathroom, the chill of the season seemed to creep up through the bottoms of his bare feet.
Should have donned socks before, he shuddered.
* * *
Even before full consciousness and coffee, there were programmed urges.
His sleeplessness had displaced blankets, and he had been cold enough to nearly awaken several times. The pain relievers and nighttime sinus pills, sometimes forgotten, he might see still laid out on the round walnut dining room table.
He knelt before the fireplace, careful not to dip a knee into the thin haze of ashes on the brickwork. New jeans, after all. There were neatly folded and stacked work jeans back in the bedroom, saved because he had never gained enough weight to be forced to discard even those bought years earlier.
The previous night’s blaze was all but vanished, with one small, flat shard to one side.
He gingerly nudged it with the care of having once grasped what he thought an extinguished ember, and burned past the fingerprints of the hand so carelessly and sleepily used.
The cat entered the den, looking to be fed, and he stared at him.
“Silly cat!” he thought, but in the comforted way pet owners acknowledged their debt to companion animals who depend on them.
First things first, he thought, stepping into a pair of worn Levi sandals, and pushing through the front screen door toward the wheelbarrow full of black locust sections he had hauled up from the road.
Despite the notion that much had been accomplished in March, he could see downhill near the workshop and shed building, the completely renovated hay wagon, bright and proud in its powder coat of Kubota orange paint, it new whitewall tires.
All that remained was to rebuild its top deck as a timber wagon.
As he hefted several short locust sections into the crook of his elbows, a series of actions flashed through his mind. The wagon needed oak planks. John Fawcett down the road had huge downed oak trees he was willing to sell cheap.
But to do so, he would need the tractor which had balked a little then refused to turn over a few days earlier. He had investigated all the easy fixes, the battery and terminal contacts, without success. There was time and the tractor store would open in a few hours, and he could pursue whether the issue was a solenoid or the starter motor.
In fact, he enjoyed the mechanical renovation and repair jobs, but it was frustrating not to have everything up and running.
Then there was the milling of Fawcett’s logs: the mill needed to be reassembled from where he had broken it down to clear out the hardwood nuts mice had brought inside the engine case.
The mill.
The logs.
The timber wagon.
It seemed too much, what with all the massive ash trees down in the windstorms of early March. These, too, would need the hard labor of his attention.
Walking back toward the front door with firewood, the landscape of the farm was as chaotic as his interior mind and the farm house, now five days without the comfort of his wife who seemed to take with her the very spirit of the place when she left.
* * *
He built a fire intentionally, as if he were an architect and the warmth of anticipation was somehow a duty and a habit, an atavistic ceremony repeated each morning in that same fireplace for two hundred forty years.
He could not get them out of mind as the shredded grocery store bag caught, and in a moment the warmth emanated into the small den crammed with books and files and papers of previous careers, and the promise of his latest adventures. Although from his wife’s historical research, the previous owners’ names were written down, he knew nothing of each beyond the simple animal pleasure of warmth at this fireplace on a chilly March morning.
The cats reminded him he had not fed either of them.
In returning outside for another load of fire wood, he was enchanted by the effervescence of springtime.
Alongside the joyous reappearance of armloads of daffodils planted decades earlier, the azaleas, the forsythias, the delicate pink cherry blossoms and the phenomenally greened meadows, there was his masterpiece of eighteenth century stone masonry, the spring house, with its raised seam roof awry from the wind and fallen tree damage of the previous June.
Its stonework in one corner had lunged outward as the weight of the sixty-foot cherry tree had impacted the roof, denting and bending enough steel roofing panels that it all had to be replaced. He had the insurance money banked, but had not been organized enough to clear the upper floor, the requirement before the stonemasons began repair work. He had been visited with a harvest friend adept at carpentry with whom he had hoped to rebuild the roof himself, but it had just not come together earlier with all the other imminent tasks and commitments.
Somehow, he might reason, the orderliness of spring might balance that chaos of accumulation of farm maintenance left undone.
As handsome as the meadows and gently sloping hills were, to all these other activities would be added the need to mow all those cleared acres.
* * *
The vineyard fence had been shredded, first in one place and gradually losing panels of fencing as the months passed. It seemed that as soon as one long panel was removed and the fencing restored, the wind would bring down another. As soon as he had finished the hard labor of clearing dead ash logs from one slope bordering the long driveway, the wind would bring down others.
It was a matter of priority to remove those snapped treetops hanging by a branch just above the access road to avoid some future disaster as he or one of the family drove beneath them.
On the other hand, the first book was finally progressing through its final corrections and formatting by a freelance editor in St. Louis.
And his daily lessons and assignments in making wine had garnered positive feedback from the instructors online at a major Eastern campus.
On an antique Queen Anne tripod table in the den, was a silver tray bearing four identical glasses of colorless liquid which he had prepared the previous day, a wine chemistry exercise.
The leftmost was water, and he remembered that any farmer’s own well spring water was by far the sweetest in the world.
To its right were three anonymous solutions which he had been required to taste and describe in writing as a lesson in oenoleptic development of the palate.
In one, citric acid was dissolved. In another, malic acid. In the third, the acid that corresponded to its sodium salt in the kitchen, cream of tartar. Tartaric acid was, in the biological universe, uniquely found in grapes.
Of course, citric acid was commonly recognized from fresh-squeezed lemon. Malic acid, likewise, though most didn’t know it, was that sharp, biting acid taste in Granny Smith apples. It was curious and remarkable to him that morning, how many sights and tastes all people experience throughout life, for which they have neither the vocabulary nor education to describe in words.
Such things, the taste of the fruit acids in these glasses, were common knowledge, and had always been through human history, and before.
The thought could not help but register as a visual image from Genesis.
There was so much of Western culture to be unpacked in the simple notion of an apple.
For example, Eve, why an apple and not a lemon? Why not a cluster of grapes to lead man astray at the maliciousness of the serpent? Moreover, what kind of apple, sweet or tart? A Granny Smith?
It wasn’t just the accusation that Woman had betrayed humanity by the first act of disobedience in The Garden, against God. Somehow, Man had remained obedient, above Sin, until his Woman enticed him, a very Middle Eastern view even then.
He might have gone further with his exegesis on this Creation Myth of Genesis as a cultural member of the family of all creation myths in all cultures, and the cultural attitudes and assumptions they exposed and betrayed.
There was also that curiously arid desert mindset of semitic and Arab Bedouin peoples so accurately portrayed by T. E. Lawrence in Revolt in the Desert (1926). In all things, it betrayed the environment in which their thoughts, behavior and culture arose.
If one’s horizons were barren rock and one’s pathways strewn with bare flint where the wind had blown away the burning sand, the notion of a simple garden was pure enchantment, above and beyond what those who grew up in the greenery of eastern woodlands could imagine.
He tried to imagine the original Eden having sprung from the mind of a small tribal grouping whose chief occupation was wandering in an arid desert.
The arid desert setting on which the drama of the Bible and the writings of Lawrence of Arabia unfolded, had a unique way of simplifying the surroundings of any narrative tale, and focusing attention of the actions of those who labored, struggled to survive and loved on such a minimalistic background.
* * *
His farm valley, in a way, might be considered his Garden of Ogham.
After all, his logging and wood milling operation, did business under the name Ogham Hardwoods Milling.
There he and his helpmeet, had spent the better portion of their lives, toiling amidst the abundant greenery, through icy and sweltering seasons and those between, enjoying each other’s company in happy isolation from the greater society and world that seemed increasingly foreign.
His wife had planted an apple tree from the seed of Heritage Apple, that had gone to a DC farmer’s market from West Virginia. His daughter had carried the fruit back to the northern Virginia farm.
Likewise, he had planted seeds in Virginia from a strain of daylily his grandfather had developed in Essex County, in New York, overlooking Lake Champlain.
The Garden of Ogham had become somewhat of a preserve as the adjacent farms fell from cultivation to poorly constructed, haphazardly designed but nevertheless large and expansive residences on extraordinarily small ground.
It brought to mind the turns of attitude engendered by ownership, or better perhaps, stewardship, of a large well-situated property by a single private owner.
That notion brought to mind economic and social systems currently undergirding the raging debate over identity.
Private ownership of land inspired a certain sense of identity and self worth that seemed to be slowly bleeding from the American national character.
It was an implicit Biblical meme, he suddenly realized.
In Genesis, Adam is not the owner but a rent-free tenant in a stable ecosystem that incorporates aesthetics of the natural world with the practical benefits of a trouble-free garden and orchard that, apparently, is pest and pathogen-free.
Adam is happily unemployed, but lonely.
It is curious that the creation story provides a fully formed and perfect Man with no predecessor. As such, a woman could have been created likewise, in whole and perfect form but with no predecessor.
Instead, Adam is the source tissue from which Woman is created.
Man, unlike Woman, is created by God, not begotten and this miraculous invention, is a trait he shares with Jesus of the New Testament. Although Adam is made in the image of God, he is neither divine nor immortal.
Like Adam, Eve is unemployed and has no assigned duties other than providing Adam companionship.
One man, one woman, no gainful employment with all their needs met by a superior being. A deeper look into this image reveals the features of a stable retirement. The superior being is all-powerful and therefore makes all the rules and sets all expectations for the loving couple.
* * *