Arrived in Door County Wisconsin late yesterday.  Since the tourist season is over, we were fortunate to find a restaurant open for our evening meal.  The placed turned out to be “fine dining” and the upshot was a wonderful meal, with superb service in a beautiful dining room which we almost had to ourselves.  Serendipity, luck, sometimes we win!  A blessing to be counted.

Having finished our meal we hustled down the road to the Door Community Auditorium.

We had tickets to the Music Maker Blues Revue with Phil Cook.  I like Blues music.  Often Blues fit my mood, my emotional temperature, my sense of the “reality” of life, never mind the fantasy that we are encouraged to pay attention to.  Turns out that this group of Blues artists have played in Carnegie Hall.  They were the real deal.  And Phil Cook, the song-writer, solo performer, happens to live in my hometown of Durham North Carolina.

We enjoyed the two hour performance immensely.  One song, Will the circle Be Unbroken was wonderfully performed by Lena Mae Perry, a black blueswoman in her 80s.  This tune always breaks me up.  The lyric goes like this.  You probably know it.

I was standing by my window,
On one cold and cloudy day
When I saw that hearse come rolling
For to carry my mother away

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, lord, in the sky

It is an old Southern hymn that is common at funerals.  Yes, I am reminded of my mother, who has passed and I feel a connection with her when I feel the tune and hear the mournful lines.  Life can be seen as a mournful tale.  Who does not desire to be eternally young, especially when one is in the prime of life?  That all of those faculties will be lost in the passage of time is quite unimaginable.  And who stops to contemplate the time before they were here, and a time to come when they will no longer be around?  It’s difficult.

I do not know about heaven, the afterlife.  I’d like to believe what I was taught as a child.  But I do know that the earth, out of which my mother found her growing up years on a small farm in Johnson County North Carolina, received her when she passed. She was always a farm girl even after moving away as an adult.  She loved the earth, the sustenance, and the unending beauty that Nature provided.

Like her I expect to return to the Earth from which I came.  The responsibility of caring for Nature and being cared for by “our mother” will pass on to our three children, and the grandchildren.  The earth is our circle, and she along with all of us, will be unbroken, as long as we take care of her.

That is the way it always has been.

 

That is enough.