I thought this was settled in the war before this war. Equality. This winter, around the fireplaces, there is hot debate in the high houses and the lowlands about equality. Who shall have it; who is unworthy. After all, the firebrands say, man was given dominion over the lesser animals.
When I was a boy, once a month, my father, brothers, and I took the farm wagon thirteen miles to Fredericksburg for supplies. While there we would take the Rappahannock Bridge to visit my aunt across the river near the ferry farm. On one winter crossing, we heard a crashing and splashing from below the bridge; a horse had bolted, turning a wagon, its dry goods, and its driver into the icy river. I turned to my father, but he was already out of our wagon and running to the river. He jumped in the frigid water to pull out whatever life was struggling there. He did not weigh the merits of the man or the equality. Whether the drowning there was a man, woman, light, dark, two-legged, or four, life was leaving and my father was there to pull it back. I am convinced the firebrands would let a majority drown without a second thought on the matter, but where I was raised, life, all life was precious and was not ours to rule or roll over.
Where I was raised, everyone works hard; the man and boy, the woman and girl, the draft horse, the bee, the bird in the wood; all have equal worth. At day’s end, we all eat and sleep, appreciated for our contribution. Not one is thought to be the lesser being.
If man was given dominion over all animals, no one told the crows.
~Michael Douglas Jones
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Toward cool water, we walked north and west in the first days; Magdaléna, Pensée, and me. We fashioned canoes from strips of alder and ash, and moved toward cool water, away from the tribal fires on the ridge, away from the war before this war, away from the past, and toward the quiet of candlelight and concord.
Just south of the Patuxent River headwaters, we walked a furlong east of the buffalo road, at the midpoint where the slope between ridge and valley branch calms to a level large enough for a small cottage; there we made a home, facing east, to welcome each morning in the neverending season of forevernow.
Now; now, we are older, we are timeless, yet the vernal equinox moves in from the valley early, across the eastern horizon of old oaks, with promises from passerines heard above the first forecast of crows. Morning wakes, taking me up to the ridge to watch winter, with her worry, fade in the dawn brightening day. Behind me at the cottage, the melancholy cooing of mourning doves atop the terracotta chimney pot, predawn’s last song, softening to silence as I climb the hill beyond the tall pines. Silhouettes of robins in the redbud offer a new song, another chance to start, and a spring season to plant life anew; the past washed away in the floods of freshet, the cool, cool water of freshet.
~Michael Douglas Jones
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In my past, there was a warehouse where I stored my weapons of war. My anger and hurt were in there, with my drawn out plans of vengeance against those that had wronged me. I locked it deep inside me as I went about my days, and now the lock has rusted shut; I cannot get back in, and I’ve forgotten what I was fighting about.
Perhaps it is time to forgive those that have wronged me and to leave the war house locked.
~Michael Douglas Jones
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We could see them,
from the parlor,
where we wavered with the waltz;
children dancing,
in the garden,
to the rhythm of the world.
~Michael Douglas Jones
Over an oakwood fire, the water I had drawn from the well on Sunday, rose in a steam cloud from the kitchen kettle, and drifted dreamlike out the open window into the winter sky.
I held my head back, and drank it in deeply from the spring rain.
This water quenched my summer thirst, and a joy of recognition welled up in me.
It rolled down my cheek as a tear, dropping onto the ground, where it joined a fallen leaf from the autumn tree.
The leaf and water merged into the soil to become the budding oak beside the well, where I had drawn water on Sunday.
~Michael Douglas Jones
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Journal Entry; Amelia Courthouse, Virginia; April 5
There were gentlemen; there were heroes; there were common men, and cowards. Death was equal in its coming. That I survived is not enough; I must prosper, that those boys be remembered. I will remember them to my own sweet mother, and if I should meet their mothers, I shall describe them, each and all, as gallant troopers to the last breath; heroic sons of America.
The many wars waged for causes, just and unjust, are eventually resolved; history is written and revised as years pass, but mothers whose sons never return will hold that simple truth in their eyes, and still continue to give again. They know no other way.
A mother is both bowl and spoon; filling, sharing, giving; seeking nothing in return; overflowing, holding nothing back.
I have nothing to offer these mothers, only my eyes looking into their eyes, letting them know that they are not empty; that I too am their son, and they are loved.
~Michael Douglas Jones
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