POSTSCRIPT

Celebrating 2017 perhaps?  Bonfire at the Hustons on January 7th.  So, maybe.

Ken isn’t around any more. 

Winter arrived. 

(such as it is, so far without decent snow for skiing, and this is Vermont, for Godssake!)

2017 began.

A new president…No, can't go there.

Things happen.

Time moves on.

Could 2017 hold promise?  

I’m still skating on thin ice.

Early winter sunset

Nevertheless, I feel better now than this:

(It’s a poem by Wendell Berry, read at Ken’s memorial party by my friend, Nancy Earsy)

When despair grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting for their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

I find grace in the natural world.  I am lucky, as the beauty of it is everywhere around me.  For “children,” add grandchildren, who seem to be making their way in the world with aplomb.  I don’t worry overly about them.  Except insofar as their country could go awry, and with it so much else. 

Classmates at Ben Huston’s school, the North Branch School in Ripton, take turns writing detailed summaries of each school week.  I’m on the mailing list.  Which is how I came to read this poem they shared last week.  It’s called “Married” and was written by Jack Gilbert, from “From The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992.”

I came back from the funeral and crawled

around the apartment, crying hard,

searching for my wife's hair.

For two months got them from the drain,

from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,

and off the clothes in the closet.

But after other Japanese women came,

there was no way to be sure which were

hers, and I stopped. A year later,

repotting Michiko's avocado, I find

a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

What did this poem say to me?  Well, it’s funny, but I have found myself using Ken’s comb, still unwashed, to comb my hair.  Part of him is still on the comb.  I had started to wash it, but then I stopped.  I like using it just as it is.  Mind you, it’s not as if I’m picking up stray hairs, or making icons of nail clippings, or anything like that.  It’s just the comb.  For some reason.  

They read good poetry at North Branch School.

The mountains with snow–the foreground–for now, without. 

But life really does goes on.  And like that trite motto you see on t-shirts, "Life is Good."  Really.