It's been a while. Since you've been gone I've been in Arkansas, California, Iceland, the Balkans (almost all of them), Maine, and Boston. Lots of times, in the case of the last two places. But best of all is being right here. I can't imagine ever leaving. It's not just home, but a place to watch the changing light of a day, the only place I've lived where I could be so aware of the seasons. Right now it's the best time of all, June, when everything is fresh and in bloom and the air smells sweet.
Many things are happening just as they did before. It's that circle of life cliché.
Swallows returned again and made their nests in the exact same places on the front porch as they did last year. They had to make fresh nests this time because I removed them when I cleaned up their poop at the end of last summer. One set of would-be parents gave me a hard time, though. There were plenty of sheltered rafters on which to build a nest, but they wanted a niche directly above the front door. We let them have it one year, but it meant angry flutterings everytime the door was opened, not to mentioned spashes of mud on the door and splatterings of bird poop to walk under or over. The next year you hung some newspaper pages along the ledges and it worked; no swallows even tried that spot. But this spring a pair of potential swallow parents thought a nest above the front door would be just the thing. I tried putting up strips of paper that I figured would blow in the wind and chase them away. It looked kind of odd, but interesting. I figured it was working until I saw a swallow squeeze in between the paper strips and attempt build a nest right there. I resorted to what you did: I taped whole pages of newspaper across every potential nesting ledge. At that, they gave up.
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| Fledglings, in their old spot. |
I've made paths in the field again, using the same tracks you began mowing eight years ago. I've kept them all mowed for several years now. But I gave up a while back on the long track you made that went as far at the road and circled around the edge of the field, the one that often had standing water in a wet spring in the sections furthest from the house. It's probably nearly as wet even now, in mid June, and I'd have gotten stuck for sure, so I gave up on that one.
The front steps that had marks from your crampons have been replaced by new, sturdier steps. It was an extra job that was done along with building a new woodshed. I won't have to build a stand-alone woodpile next winter like the ones you used to build. And taught me how to build.
Sometimes I feel I am still living in your house. It's that bookshelf full of your cookbooks. I was never a collector of cookbooks, and I was never much of an experimenter with recipes, so I didn't need all this data the way you did.
Ah, the bookshelves. You are there in the poetry books, and the mounteering guides, and the books on lichen, and mushrooms, and tracking, and the art books that you bought. I read a note the other day you had written to your old friend Arnie in Israel in which you asked him how it was he never expressed an interest in nature. You had a hard time comprehending that.
In the basement there is still camping gear. You taught me camping, and camp cooking, and backpacking. In the workshop there are endless numbers of nails and screws and mysterious oils and glues. There are, laughably, duplicates of nails and screws and the mysterious oils and glues. If something was good, surely it was worth buying again. This is why there are eight hammers and a dozen screwdrivers. I don't lack for tools.
Thank you.
