Monthly Archives: October 2019

Littleton

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I am in Littleton, Co, right now, visiting old friends. Leah, unfortunately, had to stay at home with Sam and the cats.

I arrived at my friends’ house around 9:30 local time on Friday after an almost 900-mile drive from O’Fallon, Il, where I had spent the night after driving from the New River Gorge in West Virginia. The weather along the way was quite nice, and it continued into Saturday.

On Saturday most of us went to see a car museum and then to a brewery, where they were having an animal benefit. There was a big crowd that had spilled outside into the bright and warm afternoon. There we sat and (most of us) sipped a beer while watching the people, the dogs, and this:

A French bulldog disguised as a mountain lion.

The weather has turned cold and snowy, resulting in this scene in my friends’ back yard on Monday.

Today, Tuesday, the snow is around 4 or 5 inches deep. There is light snow falling with more expected through the day. The roads are slippery enough that a trip to see a motorcycle museum in Colorado Springs this morning was cancelled, along with some school and work. My weather app tells me it’s 17F now in Littleton, while it’s 67F back home in Georgia. We’re going for a high of 19F, and a low tonight of 9F.

My friends have a dog, Elroy, whose picture I have posted before. Here he is getting ready to go outside for a quick bathroom break.

Poor Elroy is suffering from arthritis that makes it hard for him to walk and painful for us to watch. He’s snoring right now on a pad next to where I am typing this.

I have remarked before on how much he looks like Zeke. When I hear his nails tapping on the floor I expect to see my old dog.

Old river

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The New River rises in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Boone, NC, flows within the crests of the Appalachians through Virginia and then into West Virginia, where it passes through the New River Gorge. It is thought to be a very old river, maybe only as old as three millions years, maybe as old as 320 million years. Some people think it is the second oldest river in the world, but some think perhaps it is not even the oldest in North America. My brother Henry subscribed to the  very-old school of thought.

Henry wanted his ashes scattered in the New River because he wanted to be as close to the creation as possible. That has not been done yet. I’m not certain that his wife will ever do it. It’s a long drive from Chattanooga. We have not had any communication with her since the summer after Henry died, so we don’t know what her plans might be.

But for me, it was time to do something. So I scooped up some ashes from our stove and put them into a small cardboard box. Then, on Wednesday, I started out for the New River Gorge Bridge.

I got there too late in the evening to do anything, so I spent the night in a hotel not far from the bridge. Thursday morning I drove to the visitors’ center on the north side of the gorge to get a look at the bridge and the river, far below. Pedestrians are not permitted on the bridge except for one special day every year, and this was not the day.

A panorama, looking both up and down the river

I viewed the bridge from the overlook, and then drove the narrow, winding road down deep into the gorge. At the bottom of the gorge there is an old bridge that was once the only way people wanting to go from one side of the gorge to the other could go.

I crossed the wood-floored bridge and parked on the other side of the river. Then I walked out onto the bridge to take a look. The new bridge is so high above the river that it’s hard to see the scale. But Henry was not interested in the bridge, only the river.

The old bridge at the bottom of the gorge

I helped a couple of women get some photos of themselves with the bridge in the background, and then waited for them and one other tourist to leave. Then I opened the box of ashes and scattered them.

There was a steady breeze from the east. It took the ashes away. They billowed out in a thin cloud that almost sparkled. I had wondered whether I would have any sense of Henry, despite the purely symbolic nature of the act. But I did not. I thought to take a photo of the sparkling ashes, but by the time I got my camera out the cloud of ash had dissipated and disappeared.

Then I thought, that was like Henry. The ashes were there in a cloud, and then they were not. And Henry was here, with us, and then he was not. That was the closest I felt to him.

One day Henry’s wife may decide to take Henry’s ashes and scatter them into the river, and maybe she won’t. Maybe she already has. If she hasn’t, maybe she will ask us to come with her. And maybe not. However that happens, I think I have done my duty to Henry and his memory.

A treasure trove

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My Uncle Tommy, my father’s much younger half brother, died in April. A few weeks after he died, Leah and I started meeting his wife, Micki, for our regular Wednesday lunch of huevos rancheros. A couple of cousins are now joining us, so it’s a nice get together for the two of us.

Micki has been clearing out a basement full of Tommy’s huge collection of stuff. Occasionally she finds something that she doesn’t want or doesn’t know what to do with. One of those things was a laundry basket full of photo albums. The photos are almost all of my immediate family, plus several albums of photos my father shot while in Europe during World War II. Micki gave them to me Wednesday after our lunch.

The labels read “France – Germany, September 1944, May 1945” and “Belgium Germany, France England, May 1945 December 1945”.

The most amazing thing about the photos — or at least one of the most amazing — is that I have never seen the vast majority of them. In fact, I had no idea most of them even existed. I am almost certain my brother never got the chance to see them either. Leah and I looked at some of the albums, and I am entirely blown away by the photos. There are photos of my father as a young man, my mother as a kid, my brother and me as babies, family members I didn’t know, and baby photos of my nephews. There are photos of the kindergarten “graduation” my brother attended in 1952 and that I attended in 1955. There is my first-grade class photo. There is a photo of my father’s father, a man whose image was completely unknown to me until recently.

I can hardly wait to go through them in more detail and pick out some to scan.

I have no idea why my uncle had these albums at his house. The most likely explanation is that at some point my parents gave them to my father’s mother to look at, and they somehow ended up at her house when she died. A few years later her husband, Uncle Tommy’s father died. I suspect that Tommy cleared out the house when the estate was settled and took them home, maybe thinking he would give them to my father later. Based on their condition and the way they smell, I suspect that he put them in his basement and forgot about them.

You can be sure I will share some of them here.

Magic levitating maple leaf

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I was coming back up the mountain with Sam a few days ago when something caught my eye. It was a floating maple leaf.

It reminds me of the end scene for Forrest Gump, where a feather floats up and away. In this case, it wasn’t just the wind. The leaf was attached somewhere by an invisible line spun by a spider. It was flying like a kite. But it was pretty cool.

Wild tomatoes

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These little tomatoes are growing at the base of our driveway.

I picked three, and ate one. It was the sweetest tomato I have ever had. Leah agreed. Sam did not.

This spindly tomato plant is a second-year volunteer. I noticed tomatoes growing at the same place late last summer. I noticed these a couple of days ago. The plant was hidden by tall weeds, so I didn’t realize it was there until the tomatoes ripened.

I am pretty sure these came from a neighbor just up the road. I think she probably pulled up some old tomato plants late one summer a few years ago and threw them across the road. The old fruit decayed and the seeds washed away, eventually finding a home at the base of our driveway. Then they germinated and grew last summer, dropping their fruit at their feet. That fruit rotted and released its seeds, which sprouted this year.

And then I picked some and ate them. We will probably eat a few more, but we’ll leave the rest to drop to the ground. Maybe we’ll have more next year.