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Writer's pictureMatt Smythe

PEACE, REGARDLESS

Updated: Jul 9, 2020


I sing my wisdomless parable to the again changing season. To the birds’ hushed morning selves. To the gathering blanket of snow. To the clouds thinly veiling the west-setting moon while a fire builds in the blue east/southeast. It’s a song I sing alone from inside my flannel collar and a pair of untied hunting boots while the dog does her business and my kids still sleep, soon to be finding their own path in this day. It’s a song I’m growing happier to sing and each time it escapes my lungs it travels with gathering volume and purpose that carries further into the dawn woods. That carries past farm fields and timbered hillsides, past river-valleys and table-flat expanses, past canyon depths and mountain-pine heights, past desert-purple storm clouds and achingly endless highways, past oceans. A song that carries years of highwaysong tires, scuffed duffel bags and perpetually rigged fly rods, a windshield full of bugs, bad wiper blades, diners with homemade anything, crackling FM radio signals and heartbreaking lyrics, big-city bypasses, rocky coastlines, saltspray and surf, tide charts, rivers, buzzing florescent gas station lights, small-town stoplight intersections, drawls and colloquialisms, live music, cold beer, brown liquor, hot coffee held with both hands, second-shift factory traffic, railcars, cattle in tall grass, school busses and minivans with soaped football pep-rally windows, dry-stacked stone walls, stretched-wire fences, kudzu, red clay, midnight-black skies shot-through with stars, 6 a.m. flights, foreign places and voices and smells and tastes, familiar hospitality, fold-worn and yellowed paper maps, the blur of sage and horizon promise of life lived at 80 miles an hour. This morning though, while they still sleep, a heart-in-throat song of conquering the sledding hill with the kids, swimming summer away, breakfast table truths, sporting events, report cards, creek-bottom hikes, family cookouts lingering on into firefly nights, friends, laughter, campfire smoke and universe-bound sparks, being outside and in this life one season into the next and on and on. This song finding its wisdom and place. Here. In life’s run-on sentence. Peace in the cacophony.

It’s small peace. A comma. Perhaps. Maybe a line-break.  But peace, regardless. And I’m grateful for it. Here’s to 2015.

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