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| 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
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.
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| 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.
