I’m not sure if we’ve been in lockdown or under quarantine, or what the correct word is. Many things have not changed.
This time of year we walk longer up the trails and further into the woods. I can walk on bare ground on southern facing slopes, or deep under the spruce and fir. If some snow remains I step from tussock to tussock on woods reed grass (Cinna latifolia), to hide any bootprints. An old trick from my old man who used to trap cottontails or pheasants and fox or coon on not-so-public property.
We look for the antlers shedded by the bucks during the winter. I should say that I look, since my only antler-shed dog of any reliability, Lucy, is dead. So far this year, the other three have found the skull of a fawn, the ear of a doe, three legs (all by Daphne) and various ribs. No antlers.
I fish steelhead occasionally. Or I look for steelhead. In the river mouths, under the Highway 61 bridges, in the pools, jumping.
Maybe then I see one of my buddies, or my brother. Maybe on the water, and I come up to him smiling or laughing and shouting, all meaning that I’m happy to see him.
And then he backs up. Except my brother.
And I remember I am too close. I’m in that habit, picked up living in the tropics, in Southeast Asia. My first thought is to be warm with others.
But I’m already back to square one.
Square one was the first garden I remember, which was ours way up at a cabin way over in Wisconsin. That was all of our place, my German and Irish family and me, although I was only five.
Behind the cabin there was a place to hang laundry strung to the great oak tree, with a swing on a branch, and there was a good yard hacked with sweat and bile out of the sumac brakes a long time ago.
Well, we sure worked like a team at that time, my great-grandfather overseeing and cutting up the spuds for eyes, my old man and me planting the seeds and my poor mother bent over that goddam hoe, her hoeing. Somewhere was my brother in a basket being amiable.
We probably did not reap what we sowed, since we didn’t garden there again.
Now I don’t think of the swing under the great oak, or the clothesline, or our garden or place. Way back then I stepped into the thick dark sumac maze to quarantine myself and I have been doing it ever since.
Leave a Reply