Magnolia Afternoon

The old dog whined, cried out, in bone-on-bone arthritic pain, struggling to rise and then to stand. Old age had come and gone for him and now he simply waited for the end. Waited and, in gratitude for the simple gifts of being fed and loved and left alone, performed his hourly ritual of guarding.

Once he'd been a collie. Now he was just a bony frame on which there hung a roughly dog-shaped skin with patches of something like a collie's hair in places. Blind and deaf, he made an hourly circuit of the camper, slowly putting one quivering leg before the other - each step a conscious act of courage - in a clearly painful parody of protection.

Then he'd lie down. Not dig a little in the sand to make a cool place. Not go three times in circles to make things right the way a dog will do. Not even plop. He'd just lie down, making a nondescript pile of something vaguely resembling an old abandoned burlap bag.

For this, he was rewarded - once in the morning and once at night - with a bowl of saltines, broken up and soaked in milk in deference to his toothless state. Saltines and milk, verbal abuse and threats, all delivered by Aunt Mattie in the sternest tones, but with a gentle underlayment of love and understanding which would have caused his bemanged and almost naked tail to wag if he'd of had the strength to raise it from its lifeless droop.

"I'd ought to separate your head from your body you worthless old scoundrel. If I could find a ax, I'd lop that sorry tail slam off, right back of them scraggly ears."

Her hand would brush down once from the top of his old head, down the neck and to the shoulders, as lightly as the last breath of a dying butterfly. The very tip of that old and age-worn tail would almost move: the closest to a wag that he could do.

She said they were a lot alike, she and that old dog. And I guess they kind of were.

It was humid: that stuffy, sticky, can't-get-air-to-breath kind of humid. And it was hot: that old sweat-down-in-your-eyes-even-when-you-ain't-done-nuthin kind of hot - and hotter coming. And lastly it was long.

It was humid and it was hot and it was long… And it was dreadful slow.

Aunt Mattie and Mary and I sat on Aunt Mattie's porch in front of her old camper. There was a big magnolia on one side (it was to our right I think) with large thick dark green leaves and big and heavy white-white flowers. There was an old and hoary live oak in the back with limbs that spread in all directions sagging almost to the ground in places and reaching well over the camper and the porch. The giant oak hung over everything, hung and held the Spanish moss that hung upon it. Held that, and also held large patches of a gentler and more delicate soft green moss on roots and trunk – interspersed with little fungal hints of white and pink and gray.

And there were bay trees all around.

I can't tell you where it was or whether it was pink or blue or even green, but I can tell you there was a rangy untrimmed hydrangea somewhere not so far away. Probably right at the corner of the porch. I remember it just like it was yesterday. In fact I now recall that it was pink and blue and green, all three, one side colored by the tannic acid of the decayed leaves raked into a pile, the other by the long time throwing of the lye-soap-laden wash-water routinely thrown from off the porch. It wasn't at the corner, it was right there, right to our right, beside the lichen-covered concrete steps.

The porch was made of wood once painted blue. The blue had worn and faded the way old blue-jeans wear and fade. And, once the fading stopped, the peeling started, till there was nothing left to peel. The camper had been green. It too had faded, or oxidized or whatever it is that campers do to make them look the way that camper looked.

Mary had on blue-jeans, a cotton chambray shirt, and sneakers. Her hair was long and soft and brown and gold. Her eyes were gray, or blue, or both --- or maybe they were green. She sat on the porch floor, right by the steps, one knee pulled up and held in place by gravity's tension against her interlocking fingers, her back propped against one of the supports that held the rusted tin porch roof.

Aunt Mattie wore a shapeless faded cotton dress in a faded print of faded flowers. She sat in a rusty metal rocking chair. She didn't rock; she sat. Erect. And with a natural dignity. Stern of demeanor but with (to those who knew her well) a hearty laugh well hidden down beneath that harsh facade.

We simply sat and slowed the day away.

Every once in a while a bird would make the kind of sound birds make during the heat of a sultry southern summer. Every once in while a bumblebee would bumble by.

Sometimes we'd hear a car go by. Sometimes, but not so ever-often. And even the distant car sound sounded slow and tired and humid-hot.

Mary sat. Aunt Mattie sat. I rocked. We slowed the day away.

We didn't talk.

There comes a point, in love or trust or in maturity, or all of those together, where it's okay to simply sit, where talking's just not needed. Being with Aunt Mattie was enough. Just being. And watching that old dog as he so sweetly suffered.

He made another round.

Aunt Mattie spoke.

"You know, I've lived on this earth for ninety-five years… And never had to shoot but just one man… And he weren't nuthin special."

We didn't ask; she didn't tell.

We simply sat and slowed the day away until the evening's darkening shadows brought a gentle cooling breeze to break the special thick-sweet spell of June down south in Georgia.