Peace like a River

Sometimes this yearning starts up in the summer. A yearning for the south, where I grew up. A yearning  for the marsh outside of Charleston where my brother and my friend Happy Erwin and I spent hours wandering shirtless and barefoot. Sinking in the marsh mud. Talking in hushed tones about how the crabs would eat you if you sank too deep. Eat out your eyeballs. We slapped at mosquitoes and watched the pelicans lope across the sky. I loved the cabbage stink smell of the mud at low tide and walking up to the 7/eleven, covered in mud and bites, to get an icee. Past the graveyard and the haunted house. It seemed in every moment there was magic. It dripped down from the moss and rose out of the marsh. Sometimes our mother took us out to the Angel Oak on John’s Island. That tree is 1300 years old, her branches long as octopus tentacles reaching up to heaven and snaking yards and yards along the ground. if you sat under that old tree and listened real close you could hear the angels sing.

Here, in the northeast, on the farm, it sure gets as hot as any southern summer, but the marsh is fresh water. Fed by a river instead of the ocean. There is magic here too, but to my untrained eye, sometimes it’s harder to find. You have to search. So, the other day, because I was homesick and in search of memory I went down to the river to play.

The air was cool. Gusts of gadflies skimmed the smooth surface. I let my memories of the south get all tangled up in this yankee river and all the old spirituals I used to know rose to the surface… Just when I thought my soul was lost, I heard the angels singing. O sisters lets go down let’s go down come on down o sisters lets go down down to the river and pray…I’ve got peace like a river in my soul I’ve got a river in my soul…

I ran those songs all together as the sun fell down the sky. I sang loud and splashed around and took the pictures. Off in the distance my husband mowed hay, his tractor rattling across the field.

Here are the pictures that came.