Southern and Everyday Magic

There is magic in the heaviness of a southern summer morning, and maybe even more in the afternoon and evening. The thick air hugs the sparkling heart more closely, perhaps, than elsewhere, and though it may be dripping, it comforts and surrounds; it makes lazy and reflective the mind that might otherwise be engaged in pitiful trivialties, and therefore miss the stunning richness of the day.

A mother waiting for her family to come to table she’s supplied, perhaps hurredly, perhaps happily, perhaps by sheer will, is a kind of gold that filters through memory and brushes against the soul with eternal affect.

A child’s scream of delight when Daddy walks in the door from a long and tiring day, rubbing his eyes against the setting sun his whole drive home, bemoaning traffic and perhaps even more the certain chaos of scattered toys, tired wife, tireless children: the cry from young lips that idolize is gold that cannot be measured. The slumped shoulders straighten, no matter what the day held at a thankless (or thankful) job, it is delight now!

Why can’t we see the smile and sparkling eyes of those we love, but see often, for the magic that they are? Why is it that the golden thread must be ripped from our hearts (though it is entwined mightily, and therefore spins us round and round as it uncoils and is snatched away for eternity) why must we suffer this loss before we realize that such ordinary things like home, like grandparents, like slapping supper on the damn table, these things are the golden, magical things? The eternal things? The only things that hold meaning in this life?

You will find magic in the everyday, in the ordinary, in the tired, in the routine, in the expected hug and the expected noise. You will find it if you look; and my dears, if you do not take the time to look, you are to be most pitied of all men.