Opening Day & The Horizon's Glow

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…

Tomorrow is the holiest day in the baseball calendar, Opening Day. As much as I love baseball, I’m almost sorry. Right now, it is spring training time, and anything is still possible.

When I was growing up on a hard scrabble farm near Oakland City, Indiana, we didn’t have any close neighbors, except for the Heathmans, a quarter mile up the gravel road. We could have had many neighbors, though, and the nights would still have been dark. No farms had those dusk to dawn lights the way most of them do now. When it got dark, it simply got dark.

In the summer time, after the lights were all out in our house, usually not long after sundown, I would stand in the back yard, in a spot where the smell of lilac or flowering pear or honeysuckle would overcome the odors of the barn lot and the out-house, and gaze toward town. It was four or five miles away. The stars and the moon were the only illumination. On nights when their light was dim, I could see on the horizon the glow of the lights of the high school baseball field, where a semi-pro team played. It was a good team, I was told. They even had a second baseman who had played in the minors, even gotten up to Class C, before his knee got blown out.

Occasionally I could hear the low hum of rubber tires on the hard road, state highway 57, a little less than a mile away across Mr. Thiemann’s corn field and Ray and Esther Powers’ farm. We didn’t have a car, but I would imagine myself riding in a car--something like Mr. Heathman’s new blue Desoto, in which I rode to church, or Uncle Johnny’s old green Oldsmobile, in which we rode to Aunt Nora’s house on holidays—riding in a car going to the ball field. It was as far as my imagination could take me.

It’s still as far as I can go, that glow on the horizon that beckons me, that says there is something over there I can’t see, but I know it will be exciting.

JRMcF

Dave Nash says that the links to my blogs and my email, which I post below, do not work. I apologize for any inconvenience. I have redone them, and so now I hope they work. If they don’t, you can type them in yourself as they are, because they are accurate, even if not workable.

{I also write the fictional “Periwinkle Chronicles” blog. One needs a rather strange sense of humor to enjoy it, but occasionally it is slightly funny. It is at http://periwinklechronicles.blogspot.com/}

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