A Spelling Exercise

Not understanding the importance of proper spelling, the priest dispatched to save a parishioner, instead of exorcising an evil spirit, gave the spirit a brisk workout that included weight training to add definition to the abs.

--Mitchell Hegman     

Bridge

Maybe your life would be better if every day you drove across a pretty bridge on your way to and from work. 

--Mitchell Hegman

Lifting into the Light

Yesterday, the sun drew near and temperatures rose dramatically.  All at once, Montana swung out from underneath snowsqualls and landed in some semblance of spring.  My gravel road melted into a bottomless run of mud.  The first robins chip-chip-chipped at me from the nearest pine trees.  Everywhere outside, spiders and beetles and box elder bugs scuttled on the bare ground between snow banks and ascended up the walls of my house.  Flies, seemingly dead in a pile on the concrete floor inside my garage, below the window where they often gather in a panic to escape, began to spin around on the deck like tops before springing into the air and drunkenly flying out through my lifted garage door and into the universe of light.  For a while I sat on my front step watching cloud-shadows cross the blue and white Elkhorn Mountains.  I watched ravens, like polished chunks of coal, veer over the cured grass and snowpatch plain.

Some days, that is easily enough for me.

--Mitchell Hegman 

Parked

Here is a photograph taken at a local parking lot durning an early morning snowfall.

--Mitchell Hegman

Up Long before the First Light

Up long before first light, I stand at my bay window, shivering.

I am thinking, as I peer into the gloom outside, that I would do just about anything to bring my grandparents and my wife and Theresa Colley back again.

--Mitchell Hegman

Last Light

The last light is always best.  Not the fading light.  Not the light slowly softening into stars above the dusky mountains.

Not that.

The best light slants through the low clouds and into the side of the forest and mountains. The best light strikes like a single note from the deep end of a piano, ignites a single purple candle of lupine against the forest floor, defines only a single aspen tree, or spills like honey over pinedrops rising red and yellow from green grass.

If you follow the last good light you will ascend.

Always, you will ascend. 

--Mitchell Hegman

Next in Line

When I looked into the mirror a minute ago and saw my poor old face, I didn’t think about me.  Me, the graying man looking out at me, the unshaven man looking in.  I saw, instead, a memory from grade school gym class.

Who knows why our minds leap about and flip sides as they do?  We are fickle and generally unruly in our thinking.  So, my mind jumped back through all the years as I looked into the mirror.

There we stood in white tee shirts and red shorts on the gymnasium floor—sixth-grade boys with pitchy voices and aching muscles.  We stood in line, bathed in bright light, awaiting our turn at the pull-up bar fastened to the wall above the polished hardwood deck.  Each of us was expected to jump up, grasp the bar, execute ten clean pull-ups, drop down, and let the next kid take a turn.

One by one, gangly boys flung themselves at the bar and ten-counted.  Pretty soon one of the obese kids stepped up to the bar.  He just barely managed to jump up and hang from the bar.   His gym shorts were as wide as a stuffed chair.  And he just draped there for a long, long time, trying to pull his face to the bar.  Up halfway on the first attempt.  Up one quarter the distance on the second.  Up only a little on the third. Then just hanging there, embarrassed.

We all knew that he would never pull a single one.  He never did.

So, I looked in the mirror, remembering that.  Reliving that time until a single tear escaped the corner of my eye.

I really liked that kid.

--Mitchell Hegman