forty five

On Friday we walked up to Andy's spot with many of our favorite rocks collected from places such as Alaska, Baja, Utah, Michigan, South Dakota, Florida, Minnesota and Wisconsin.  All places we visited with him.  There are many more to bring from our collections, and in the years to come I'm certain we'll continue to walk up the hill with pockets full of beauty to lay at his feet.  To remember and to celebrate our love.  It was his 45th birthday.

Always in November I would then be only one year older, instead of two.  At least until May.  Now he is 45 and I am 46.  Really he is forever 44 but I can't think of it that way.  Yesterday I sat on his meditation cushion by the fire and willed myself to feel him present.  Sometimes I do.  Sometimes I am just overwhelmed by the idea that he is gone.  Like somehow I just learned that fact again.  And again.

Yesterday was grey and raining and the girls missed their dad.  It was the kind of day that he would play board games with them or work together in the shop.  We were fragile, limping through our day doing chores and trying not to feel his absence.  Elsa found a coloring page that she was sure she worked on with her dad, but Iris was sure she had worked on it with him.  They fought over it because it was what they had left.  That old coloring page.

I'm trying to decide if I should sell Andy's tractor which is ancient and finicky and buy a new one that I can rely on.  But I can't decide.  I just go down and look at the old tractor and picture his gloves on the wheel as he plows snow.  How can I still have the gloves and the tractor and not him?

Redemption Song

Finally Fall.

At last the mist, 

heat's haze, we woke 

these past weeks with

has lifted.  We find

ourselves chill, a briskness

we hug ourselves in.

Frost greying the ground.

Grief might be easy 

if there wasn't still

such beauty- would be far

simpler if the silver

maple didn't thrust 

its leaves into flame, 

trusting that spring

will find it again.

All this might be easier if

there wasn't a song

still lifting us above it, 

if wind didn't trouble 

my mind like water.

I half expect to see you

fill the autumn air

like breath-

At night I sleep

on clenched fists.

Days I'm like the child

who on the playground

falls, crying

not so much from pain

as surprise.

I'm tired of tide

taking you away, 

then back again-

what's worse, the forgetting

or the thing

you can't forget.

Neither yet-

last summer's

choir of crickets

grown quiet.

Kevin Young

Andy's Orchard.  La Valle School.  What an honor to this man who is so loved.