The breeze arises in the treetops, then descends. Between gusts, I can hear water rushing through an upstream beaver dam.
I hear one bluejay talking to another. I watch a handful of goldfinches hunt for sunflower seeds below the birdfeeder that my wife insists on using even though natural food abounds now, just so she can see them in all their variety. “Do you know purple finches poop is purple?”
Bullfrogs sing-song from the water; tree frogs peep from the trees.
The branches of the dozen or so bur oaks that once bordered the Martin and Irene Davidson home, reverberate behind me in a light south wind, a house that my aunt and uncle built with spruce they cut here. They were the people who walked outside to the outhouse, mornings and evenings, before the indoor toilet was plumbed-in; it was their house where coffee was boiled on a cast iron woodstove in the kitchen before they got a modern stove that used propane.
Life was good. It was the early fifties.
Their children gladly left this place of peace and toil--and boredom-- compared to the hustle of city places where things were ‘happening’ and people were ‘gettin’ down’ and there were lighted streets at night and cars and buses and businesses open twenty-four hours a day, places where things were going on and you could get a good job and rent your own place and meet some new people that did more than farm the land, work sun up to sundown until their body ached; sometimes getting so dirty that it’d cloud the water in the tub, and Sunday was the day of rest--only after the cows were milked and fed.
A bluejay’s melodic song; the sweetness of its rise and fall.
The breeze is gentle against my back. An invisible woodcock dives somewhere overhead, high against the cloudless blue sky.
On a mission toward the woodlot, a kestrel swoops across the vast yard, two feet from the ground, its wingtips almost touching the grass.
In 1969, Martin and Irene moved the house into Roseau. Their barn was sold and moved to Skime. In 1971, their farm was sold to me.
The house’s concrete stoop exists, a concrete ruin of their dream. It was the doorway where they walked from outdoors, indoors, where, as I remember, whenever I smell it even today, the fragrance of burning baumigilead, reminds me of those days of their basement woodstove and its pleasant wood smoke smell as it wafted up the steps.
Like that fragrance, Martin, Irene, Dean, Jack and Karen, have all passed on, but live in my memory.
Listen! A whippoorwill ....
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