Saxapahaw on a rainy day

Saxapahaw is trying to stay still and obliging to the river's rhythm, despite encroachment of hipness, new construction, highway regurgitation of the american lust for sameness and convenience.  Today I see its colors; warm gray/taupe, yellow/orange early fall greens against evertrue evergreens and tinges of burnt siena.  The Haw water is inky warm black/brown as it welcomes the light gray misty rain, heavying the air that is reminscent of the just ending summer's humidity.  Warm rain has double parked over North Carolina from mountains to coast today and is in no rush to move down the road.  After days of dry heat and summer's last fling with grass and leaves, a smudging of low smoky clouds are here and I interpret their message to say "slow down."  So I drove myself to Carrboro for a concert and a drink.

Aging makes me pine for revisiting what I know to bring happiness, like the sound of music from familiar people. Linford Detweiler and Karin Berquist caught my ear at a time of deep questioning.  Music is so powerful and can move us towards light and darkness.  I've used music like a drug before.  Swilling it down and pouring its gasoline on a fire that often needed to be extinquished, but instead, the music helped keep it going.  Over the Rhine's music was part of the cocktail I used years ago.  I saw them perform live last night again.  There has been a long hiatus between us. I have gotten healthier, and they have changed too.  But to hear some of those old familiar lyrics and the same golden honey sounds of their in-love selves still crooning adoringly to each other, tapped my recovering self and challenged my heart.  It tapped into deep longing - the hunger that had me asking questions as the music dripped over me:  is it too late for me to have the life I want;  what is the life I want;  what will I do with the love I want to share with someone in this life;  who will I share my deep joy and deep sorrow with;  how will I get to the picture I have in my mind's heart of a life that is simple and deep - one of gratitude and one that I can share with others who need respite and a place to tell their stories - a place for their stories to be heard?  

The old songs played and I choked back tears.  I was in the throws of love back when they were singing those songs - the in-love addiction that has you flailing around like a fish on a hook.  You know how much better it will feel when that hook is removed, but that bait is so sweet.  And I'm joyful that I've been released....but I remember the euphoria too.  I remember too much - hands, neck, eyes, voice, mouth, promises, breath and sleep.

And then they played this song:  

Just shy of Breakin’ Down

There’s a bend in the road that I have found

Called home

Take a left at loneliness

There’s a place to find forgiveness

Called home

With clouds adrift across the sky

Like heaven’s laundry hung to dry

You slowly feel it all will be revealed

Where evening shadows come to fall

On the awful and the beautiful

Every wound you feel that needs to heal

And silence yearns to hear herself

Some long lost memory rings a bell

Called home

Old pre-Civil War brick house

Standin’ tall and straight somehow

Called home

Mailbox full of weariness

And a word of hard won happiness

Called home

Leave behind your Sunday best

You know we couldn’t care a less

Out here we’ve learned to leave the edges wild

And stories they get passed around

And laughter – it gets handed down

Read it in the lines around a smile

Our bodies’ motion comes to rest

When we are at last

Called home