My Dear Friend,



          I have wondered how your garden faired this year without you. Did the love of your life rise that first warm morning after and spread the seeds you so carefully collected? Or did the winter of your passing settle so deeply into her bones that the season came and went unnoticed? I too have turned up the icy scar, plowing along, another ring added, and stand among my own neglect, wondering who will bring her firewood?                                                                                            

I cut work...

Cut some pancakes...

Cut some logs...

Cut some grass...

Cut some boards...

All in all, not a bad birthday. 

In the Sunlight of Yesterday

She said that she had wanted once to be cremated when she died. Then she discovered that they had to remove any artificial joints, pins and fasteners, before the incineration. Both of her knees had been replaced. She had an artificial hip as well, and a steel rod that ran the length of her back. “I thought it was the way to go,” she said, “until they told me that.” She sat at the nook there in her yellow on yellow kitchen, in the house she had lived in for well over fifty years. On the table, freshly baked banana bread cooled. The house smelled of spice. “Why, they’d be cutting on me for days,” she said, rolling out foil to wrap the bread in to. “Besides,” she went on, “I just couldn’t stand the thought of some big black man’s hands digging around inside of me.” The image made her shudder. “I told them they’re just going to have to bury me, and that’s that.” She laid a loaf of the bread on to the foil and began to wrap it, folding the corners neatly, as if it were a gift. “I made an extra,” she said, holding up the foiled bread, “For you.” In the window behind her, an old magnolia stood, richly green. A breezed moved through the tree, stirring shadows in the kitchen that, until then, had lay still and unseen. “Don’t forget to take it with you when you leave.”

Box of Dog Snacks...



Feeding Instruction Number Four...

                  "Monitor your dog to ensure treat is adequately chewed prior to swallowing."

Seriously?

Do you even know a dog?

Midway

He did not feel old. Sore and stiff, yes, but not old. The stiffness, he knew, would work its way out as soon as he got moving. It wasn’t his age. He’d seen younger men complain about how they ached after doing half the work he had done that week. It was the natural reaction of any body at any age to such labor.

     He didn’t doubt he needed a day or two of rest, time to let his joints and muscles recuperate. But at present, a good night’s sleep was all he could offer, and that was scarce. He worried though, that if his life went on like this—and it seemed it would—that he would be crippled as an old man, confined to a chair or bed.

     But then, too, he thought, it could be just the thing to carry him beyond a hundred years.

     A hundred years. Imagine.

     He did not feel old at all.

 

 



On Not Remembering



He would not have remembered. The day would have moved along as any other, had he not looked at the World’s events, something he rarely did. Even as he stared at photographs of the new Tower, rising in glassy defiance, it was slow to register. Today, he thought, it was today. He had shut from his mind, long ago, the more horrific images of those who chose to jump. They tore too deeply at his gut. But he saw now the flames, the spire of smoke, the absence on the skyline. He would not have remembered. The day would have moved along as any other. But he carried the day with him. He felt its weight, silent as a stone.                                                

Vying

          It didn’t matter to the dog that its feet were sopping wet, the cat either. What mattered was the smallness of his lap, a place the dog was far too big to be arranged, though he would try and try again, if only to remind the cat who the lap belonged to.