These are pictures from last year since my Hughesnet refuses to upload or download or whatever the hell it does to send my pictures from my phone to my inbox–so we are not QUITE this far along color-wise as the last picture, but we are farther along than any year I’ve ever seen.
It’s game day and we will be making wings in a bit here, rooting for our Lions.
But one of my blogging folks prompted us to write a poem about what we saw out of our window and I roughed this out thinking of Dad here a week or so ago, not poetry, since I’m no poet. A bit of prose:
Upper Peninsula overcast where the sky can be seen at all through the trees, the windows floor to ceiling frame a woodstove, the view a welcome respite from my 88-year-old father’s home where the view consists mostly of witnessing his battle with Parkinson’s and heart disease and COPD—but here in my own living room I’ve hardly seen this summer—eighty-foot white and red pines surround the “camp” –anything off the grid up here so-called, though it’s our full-time home — the only difference from one window to another is the Little Two Hearted River on the north of our 35-acres running inexorably to Lake Superior, (not to be confused with Hemingway’s “Big Two Hearted” which is close and also dumps into Gitchee Gumee) –ferns turning a crusty dry brown, scrub maple trees just inside the rim of evergreens already showing traces of crimson and orange, so early this year, earliest ever: “I want to see it one more time,” my father says, “I love that place,” and so we clear the room of anything upon which he might trip– he has to sleep on the couch here and this is exactly his view out those floor-to-ceiling windows but where I will see the stain on my leather sofa, urine-soaked, forever; something darts quickly past, and I’m not sure if it’s a squirrel, a brown hare, probably not a grouse since it isn’t big enough for a deer, certainly no bear, and ‘had the move on” as Dad would say—“It’s still,” he says as I help him out of the couch and into the big easy chair—“ no wind,” he pronounces, since the weather and boating report has been his major topic of conversation for my 60-some odd years—“no wind,” he says–he falls asleep and I listen for HIS wind, so light and shallow sometimes I have to put my ear next to his chest– as the breeze lifts a swaying maple branch outside my window–not still yet. Not yet.
Happy Sunday, folks. I dreamed about dogs, a friend’s dog Lily on my lap (dog way to big to sit on your lap), my dog Maggie angry at someone invading our back yard. I dreamed I had a fancy dinner party and neither of my kids came (I thought I was over nobody coming to my reading, but must be a while longer, ha), there was someone invisible in my back yard trying to steal something that was like a little silver pipe or something. I picked it up before the invisible ghost could spirit it away. Still, rarely those dreams of my late mother I covet, and nothing to explain who “told” her my son would be born with Down Syndrome…
L.E.K. 