the road

A sixty-six year old story takes awhile to tell. It is a quiet one. Like the winding path up the knoll, past the musky scent of horse as I turn the corner that brings me back to you. Passing the old board that bears your name and through the thick forest that served as haven. Up to the porch where your crooked grin and the worn brim of a work hat is as intimately a part of this place as are the falling leaves and caw of the crow.

With lingering memory, the seasons continue their shift. And now all moments have been fed back into the wonder as a wave into the sea that made it. I hear you in a beating feather. I smell you in the gasoline and cold metal of a workshop that provided a tinker's bliss. And it is here I begin the journey to sift through lives well led, well loved...saving pages of the book that tell the tale.

Day after day, box after box, my sister and I have wiped the dust away and sorted through my parent's things. Stopping at times to hold a trophy, a drawing, a crumbled macaroni pencil holder with a barely readable 'I love you, Mommy' written on it's metal bottom. My favorite stuffie whose felt crown bore a tiny hole from a finger used to carry it about. Dolls, diplomas, the small, black velvet cape my grade-school grandmother wore through many a snowy, West Virginia winter. It is here I smile, I remember, and sometimes swallow my tears as I sit on an overturned bucket to peruse the tea-colored pages of my dead brother's baby album.

It was on a hot, sticky day three when I found an old box containing my mother's love letters to my dad while he was away at war. I took the treasure home with me that evening and spents hours reading the simple but eloquent words of a young lady asking her beloved to return home safe and that she would be waiting for him....true and brave, her love. And she did. And for the next six decades dedicated every fiber of her being to creating a nest for Papa Bird and her chicks. It was alone that night, within the walls of my dimly lit bedroom, wine and tissues at my side, I sobbed. A wail so deep and nourishing..it heals. Those letters, like a precious jewel..a symbol of the love that made me. I will honor and hold them dear all the days of my life.

And so it continues. Sis and I are slowly closing up shop. With each passing day, the house empties just a little bit more and we flinch at the thought of circling out of the drive for the last time. The mirror's shrinking reflection of the purple glint of the blackberry bushes, the jonquil patch and that sweet, yellow clapboard house. No matter who may claim the ground, this mountain will always be my fathers. He and his lady's ashes will rest here together in the whisper of the trees. And a piece of my heart will be left behind in its company.