Nanci Griffith has been one of our family’s favorite musicians since our boys were small. All three of our kids have been reared listening to her Texas folk sung with a thick twang. She’s our mainstay on long drives across Texas when we are in a “Lone Star State of Mind.” What we like about her is that her poetry is serious – not a C&W genre. We have heard her in concert in Austin, Ft. Worth, and Houston. Once, in Houston, we got to go backstage to the green room and meet her because Rex Waldheim, one of our astronaut friends, the guy who introduced us to her music long ago when there were only cassettes and vinyls, had recently flown a CD of hers on a shuttle flight, and was delivering it to her after the concert in Jones Hall. She was funny and gracious, holding her glass of white wine and posing for photos.
One of Nanci’s early pieces is called “Gulf Coast Highway.”
She sings of a couple who have lived a hard, but ordinary life, along the Texas coast. He’s found work where he could -- the railroad, in the rice fields and on the oilrigs in the Gulf of Mexico. They lived in a little house off U.S. 90, the old coastal highway that was supplanted by Interstate 10. They describe their home as “the only place on earth bluebonnets grow; once a year they come and go at this old house here by the road.” Even when they are young, they anticipate the day that, “when we die we say we’ll catch some blackbird’s wing, and we will fly away together come some sweet bluebonnet spring.” As they grow old together, the jobs are gone. They spend their days simply: “we tend our garden; we set the sun” still hoping for that “sweet bluebonnet spring,” when they will “fly away to heaven.”
Those words echoed in my mind frequently yesterday as Melinda and I continued to work on the garden project at the farm. (Details in a following post.) Having pulled weeds, cultivated, mulched, and cleared leaves from under the old live oak while Melinda added a dozen plants to what was already in place, we sat on bales of hay and watched the sun go down over the blue-green wheat that has now developed heads of grain. We tended our garden. We set the sun.
We’re really not ready to fly away yet. The jobs aren’t gone and there is much to do in life. It did make me think of mortality, though, something I manage to skillfully avoid most of the time. A friend half my age lost his life a month ago. While crossing the street on campus yesterday, a close brush with a careless driver reinforced the uncertainty of my own life.
The psalmist encouraged that kind of thinking –
Our days may come to seventy years,
or eighty if our strength endures;
yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,
for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
teach us to number our days,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom. (Psalm 90)
These days do quickly pass. I remember last spring here like yesterday. These Texas springs are a finite resource. I have a limited number left – twenty-five or thirty perhaps if “my strength endures.” That knowledge heightens my senses to the beauty of the dandelions scattered across the field and the occasional bluebonnet that has found a home at this old house here by the road.
A voice says, “Cry out.”
And I said, “What shall I cry?”
“All people are like grass,
and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field.
The grass withers and the flowers fall,
because the breath of the Lord blows on them.
Surely the people are grass.
The grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the word of our God endures forever.”
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