Lord of The Rings

Back in the day, Melissa and I spent a lot of time on a small section of Elkhorn Creek. The land fronting it was owned by a guy named Joe Hieronymus. I met him by accident and he told us we could go wherever we wanted. We had a lot of fun fishing there. Actually, Melissa did the fishing. I mostly got my line caught in the trees. I used to deny that, but it’s true! Thankfully, Jesus instituted that whole fishers of men thing…

Anyway, the spot was nice, not quite secluded, but quiet. A small riffle from a deep pool led to water that shoaled across some gravel and water plants. It was a good place to fish. You could cast up into the pool, hoping to catch a small mouth that had no clue you were there. Or you could cast just below the riffle, or along the bank where the water got deeper. We spent so much time there that we didn’t always go to fish. We just traipsed around. We used to catch crawfish for bait. Man, those suckers were big. Not quite Louisiana big, but I was surprised the crawdads were as big as they are. Scientists say that crawfish come from the Cumberland River drainage, which is hard to imagine, but there you have it. Raccoons have a field day with the mussels—nothing but cracked shells. And then there are bits of crawfish strewn on the rocks, so I guess they’re going to town on them, too.

I had this plan to take Melissa back there on her birthday last year, but she was in too much pain in advance of the bone marrow transplant. And this year, well, she was in the hospital and way too weak to hike down the hill if she had been out.

I had a weird impulse these past few days and I was not sure what to do with it. I spent some time praying. This morning, on the way in, I decided I just needed to go with my gut. I took a turn off 64 and headed over to the Elkhorn. Hadn’t been in a few years, not since we were in Winchester. They fixed the bridge, and the access is not the same. So I clambered down the bank, almost slipped and thought it would not be good to be laying on the rip-rap with a broken leg and the cell phone in the car…

Got down to the creek and ran across the riffle to get to the big clump of water plants and their pretty white flowers. The impulse. I had a piece of wire and I tied my wedding ring to the ring Sissy had got for me, the one with the Hebrew on it. Said a few words about always wanting to get back here, and it felt like we had, and I’ll leave it at that. I tossed them into the pool below the riffle. I have no clue what it’s all about. Maybe in a thousand years, some Hobbit will find it... I got back into the car, took off. Turned on the radio and had to laugh: “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” came on. I hated that song, loved to hate it, but Sissy liked it. A dominant image of medieval courtly poetry is the time when “the rose was without thorn;” before the Fall of Man. There was a hope that when Jesus returned to make all things new that the rose would again be without thorn. The medieval mind was also captivated by the principle of mutability. That is, things that change. If they change, they are not permanent, and are subject to decay and death. The great hope was that the eternal, unchangeable God would hurry up. We think those times were the Dark Ages, but having studied them for 20 years now, I think they knew more than we will. I wrote a series of poems for Sissy, called “The Sublunary Anniversaries—“ “sublunary” because we are under the moon, the universe’s constant reminder of mutability. I had no clue that once you begin to play with the image, you will be taken along with it, that there is much more to it than my optimistic idea that in love, we would “Wax to generosity of intent.” Oh, sure that’s there. But there comes a time when you have to face mutability squarely. Heraclitus said you can’t stand in the same stream twice. I’m not sure you can do it once.