In Idle Hours | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: Please join me in welcoming Author Michele Rhem, who presents us with her poignant mémoires of the Rabbit Patch, where her diaries weave tales of a simpler, expressive life lost to many, but gathered together in her most familiar environs - the Rabbit Patch.

    Sometimes, there are idle hours at the rabbit patch-I make certain of it. "Idle" doesn't always mean time without purpose, sometimes it means frivolous or easy. That thought best suits what I am calling idle hours. I read books and poetry in idle hours or I write. I watch clouds and make pictures out of them, like I did when I was six. I think of my dreams, the night before and I have no shame in this.

    Mostly, I am at the morning table, with the morning window by it, during idle hours. Last night, I sat in moon shine and read. I rose early this morning and watched the light change while I drank coffee-where the moonshine had fallen last night. I took the time to feel glad about something that had happened yesterday. I read something nice and said a prayer. Such things are of great comfort to me and the thing is, I have come to depend on having some time at the morning table.

    When I came home yesterday, the fields around the rabbit patch were bare. A group of about a dozen farmers were standing by combines and pick-up trucks, in what had been a cornfield, that same morning. Two huge grain trucks were bumping full of bright yellow corn and I guess the men were wondering what they would get for it and deciding the best place to carry it. It was a familiar sight for me. I have great respect for farmers. As long as a farmer can, he still works. Grandsons ride them around in old trucks and ask for advice about the crops, when the farmer can barely stand. When it snows at the rabbit patch, it is the farmers that clear the road-likewise, fallen trees. No matter how many "lofty notions" a person may have about himself, it is a farmer that feeds him.

    I saw a small flock of birds flying yesterday. They were swooping and swirling and so I watched them a while. It was quite spectacular. They moved like they were one, instead of twenty. Blackbirds are too common to be considered anything but ordinary -until you see them flying. That can change your mind about them in a few short minutes, though you are liable to stay longer.

    I went out tonight, as is my habit. The sky was covered in clouds so thick that I could only see Venus, but I made a wish anyway. I smelled the damp leaves, for the first time this year and I heard a whippoorwill singing. The moon was rising over the bare field behind the old barn . I don't know if I was there ten minutes or ten years as an idle hour does not pass in the same fashion as the way of clocks that hang on walls. . .but instead is measured by things like standing in moon shine. . . . or blackbirds flying.