An incredibly beautiful fall day, the calm before the storm as the Frankenstorm, Sandy, is at sea off the coast of Charleston and the Outer Banks, aiming at the Jersey Shore and New York City on Monday night and Tuesday. I parked off Woodburn and as we crossed the wide field, aromatic with scents of cut grass and fallen leaves, memories flooded my brain of the field behind my father's childhood home in North Wales, Pennsylvania. After supper on summer evenings, Aunt Mae and Uncle Les would take us along with their several dogs in the twilight out across that field to the little mill house and pond where we would skip rocks. That three story house, fronted by tall boxwoods, had been the home of my father, his three sisters, Ganner and Gapper, Aunt Mae and Les, their two sons,Andy and Bob (then grown), Aunt Joyce (whose friend came to dinner and stayed eight years), Uncle Charlie, (who was a successful song writer and later an alcoholic, whose wife had died and left him with his son , Charles, who died at eighteen of meningitis) Auntie (Gapper's sister Florence) and her husband, Uncle Doc(who was an opthalmologist).
My father, David, was born on Poplar St in Philadelphia and delivered by his cousin, Elizabeth, a medical doctor who trained at the Medical School for Women in Philadelphia. Later, the family moved to the house in North Wales. Once, in the dark, I looked out of the second story bedroom window and saw a spectacle of fireflies lighting simultaneously on and off in the field across the street. Once, we found a human skeleton in the loft of the barn out back which turned out to be from the cadaver that Uncle Doc dissected in medical school.
Today the wetlands are full to brimming. There was a huge dam built with the genius architectural plans lurking in beaver brains. I saw a hawk alight on a branch which broke under him. Then crows chased him off through the cloudless blue sky. A tall very blue colored, blue heron stood in the creek where it rippled over rocks. Seeing us, he flew up and downstream.
I pointed him out to a walker arriving on the scene and he said, in his Norwegian/Minnesotan accent,
"Yah, Yah, I have seen him before.
Yah, Thank the lord."
I picked a bouquet of flaming zinnias, red, orange, white, yellow, pink, salmon which have been planted along the path and along the edge of the field. They grace my dining table.
I am recovering from an abcessed tooth which began to bloom on the trip back from Edisto. Hannah told me that I looked very scary in my rumpled camp clothes and boots, my swollen and distorted face, carrying a pick axe which I brought for Patrick to chop up the stumps of the cherry trees. I look forward to a root canal next week.
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