Honey

Honey likes to play his guitar. He plays it as a meditation. He says now it's hard to play it for entertainment, or to sit and strum as he used to do. He lays down and begins to play and goes into meditation and the music plays. Sometimes he remembers a thread of it later, but most times, the music winds its own way and he travels on the thread of it.

Right now, he's making looms. He can't work for long. He's got health problems that have intensified in the last few years. But he can sit awhile at the loom and the strings he plays there have a visual music -- and this too, is becoming a meditation for him, the way spinning is for me.

Honey has worked his whole life. He has Mars in the tenth house. He worked from the time he was ten years old, first at a grocery store, stocking the shelves and then at a gas station. Then a garage. Then the coal mine, the same time he was a farmer. Then he was a preacher. He worked at a group home. He worked at a Jr. High with a student who needed extra help toward integrating into the classroom. He mostly just sees what needs doing and tries his hand at it -- sometimes it's win and sometimes it's fail, but always it's try and do what you can.

I once wrote a song about him. Oddly enough, I wrote it the day before I met him:

We rise up in the morning
and stand beneath the pines,
Breathing mountain sunshine
in the dawn of morning time...

It goes off into verses and talks about the farmer who brings out his old guitar in the evening to sing the old songs

In the evening watching the sun go down
And the fireflies strike a light
He brings out his old guitar
To serenade the night

Finished up a full day's chores
With the nighttime standing by,
and my man and I are living
In the wild and good ole times...

My man's a farmer
Watching evening come
My man's a farmer
And I'm glad we're home....

We've been married since April 17, 1976. I'm not saying we've never had a row -- we've had a few. We both evolved and lived our stories in the way that seemed right at the time and not too shaky, even in retrospect.

I loved the early farmer years before farm became commercial. I liked the church times best as we were leaving out of there. I liked the time we built that house down at Kintecoy, although it seemed a solitary time. I liked the Asheville years and the time we opened a bookstore in Richwood. I liked the Lewisburg years, and the time we dug an old house out of the ruin someone had left it in and made ourselves a home there.

I'm looking forward to the next leg of this journey, cause I know it doesn't stop here. Another poem I wrote for honey ended with a rhyme, the gist of which said:

When you're old, you won't be doing no front porch dreaming of times gone by. I'll say, "Where you headin', Wild?" and you'll say, "'on', just on".