Morning Shine | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: Please join me in welcoming Author Michele Rhem, who presents us with her poignant memoirs 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.

    I am a long time admirer of "morning shine", and never so more than now, when it falls on a field of snow. These mornings, when snow is on the rabbit patch, are few and far between - and so when I went out for wood, I braved the icy trek to the quiet field behind the oldest barn. I did question my decision several times along the way. The air seemed brittle and likely to shatter. The ice made every step a challenge to stay upright, but when I saw the field covered in snow, and the morning shine on it, I was not sorry. I was looking at a field of diamonds-and nothing less. I felt like I was at church and that it was a holy day.

    I did gather some wood eventually and made it back to the old and cold farmhouse. I have never been good at starting a fire, but this morning I had a softly burning fire in good time. The pipes did not freeze last night, so I put a pot of beans on. The animals seemed on the brink of starvation, so I fed them and sat down to remember the morning shine on the quiet field.

    It wasn't long before the beans started simmering. The animals, content with full stomachs, gathered to sleep by the warmth and I settled by the morning table under an electric heated throw that Tres and Kelsey had given me. My coffee is in an adorable china cup that Miss Alethia, Jo Dees' mom gave me . I am surely in a lovely place at this moment.

    If someone had told me in my youth that sitting in a chilly farmhouse while a pot of beans simmered on the stove would be a lovely moment in my later life, surely I would have sunk in despair. This was not what I imagined in youth, to be a joyful moment. I think we spend our youth gathering tokens, of sorts. As we go along, we discard, til at last we understand ourselves enough to know what we truly value. Those things, we cling to and hold fast. In this way, we are born slowly and our authenticity is revealed in our very deliberate lives.

    I can not feel sorry, that for now I am on a humble rabbit patch. I stood in morning shine by a field today and it did not seem like a tragedy. . . or a lesser life.