Nobody tells you that your sunglasses will fog up—that the heat from your eyes will vaporize and blind you, and force you, after too long, to shed the shield, and feel it: the air rushing across your ears, the sun refracting through streaked saltwater, the impression of a hole marked for digging in the base of your throat.
How could you have known you'd have to pull over, just before a bridge, hazards on, rattled by semis and buzzed by minivans on their merry mysterious ways?
Who could plan to stall, tensed and squeezed and contracted, always about to be whiplashed by 80,000 pounds 18 wheels 89 years all in a flash and a crunch—it doesn't come. And your glasses wrest back control of their gleam, and heaving, gulping, grasps for air ease, as your brain remembers itself.
HOLIDAY TRAVEL EARLY
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PLEASE PLAN YOURThe advice is almost funny, flashing by flipped on its head as you accelerate back into the flow, thumping over the bridge joints, headed east four days too soon.
But then, who would have intentionally sold the two books you bought in a barn the week before, where fluttering pages hang from the eaves on twine, dancing in the drafts between the slats where hay used to stack, dried out, tied up, and retired to the mezzanine—safe from craning, hungry necks but so easily pushed into freefall...
It must've puffed out around the edges of the bale as it impacted, tied strong in the center but still hitting the ground with a thud. I wonder if those first snatches of loose grass felt special, catching the light. And what a track they must have seen! from seed to field to sun to glorious, fleeting flight, before they met the un-ceremony of their resting place, tossed in the rough blanket of a cudding tongue.
And just that simply, you've stumbled back into hazard, because sure, cows aren't anything like apples, and it was never a dairy farm, but still: he grew up in the fields, and you are on your way to sit vigil with the blankets as they encircle him. About to feel their scraping, irregular comfort, vaguely apologetic, as if they couldn't help but remind you that they can only insulate for so long: that the air couldn't help but seep in through the gaps, and the cold couldn't help but steal up from the legs, and that it won't matter how much you'd like to imagine that holding hands would transfer fuel, not just warmth already burned. But the blankets will scratch at you, and you’ll do it anyway, because apparently that furnace is inherited, and it's a small repayment as his stores are running low—58 years was a long time to keep his warm enough that she always knew they were there for her.
You'll stuff the stained wool into a plastic bag two days after because the tang is woven into the fibers, and Mom can't smell that again.
So the fog rolls back in, coating the bottom of your tongue. Whatever wisdom you were about to stumble upon from those two books settles with a waiting smile back into their pages, to be refound two weeks later and scribbled into a notepad, only to be lazily crossed out—it'll just feel a bit trite by then.
Because for now, you're straining to hear him grow up again, nine decades on. To recall a memory retold at an Easter table back when you were half paying attention because the stories would never end: of scrambling up bark to pull down the high fruit, and lobbing cyanide pills from a rolling flatbed into every hole where the snout of a groundhog had maybe popped up even once, because they were getting after the crop.
And of a boy, thoughtlessly taking aim at a shadow atop a branch up beyond the apples, then learning how long clutched feet can keep a crow perched, rigorous, inverse, and still, swinging in the breeze: days, until a ladder and the time can be spared. Of how those two acts impressed on him, ruminating on the lessons of purpose, and intent, and impact. He next picked up a rifle in peacetime, in the hope he would only ever hold it.
Soon, his knuckles, posed over each other, will feel cold and hard for the first time, and you'll be glad that you'd never touched his hand from the top until then, so that the startling bump of refrigerated veins can be remembered as a distinct, alien thing… not the same as the ones that pump and flex and catch the light as you type the words and stuff the bags and donate the clothes and sort the notes that need keeping from the desperate scribbles on the backs of anything a pen could mark, recording phone calls, meals, nonsense, names heard that he felt he should know because once you lose them, every stranger sounds like they could have been a friend, stumbled into on a ski lift or a river boat. When "connector of people and collector of stories" would carve so well into granite if the words would only fit and cover, yet! so many more cry out for including—so many that no inch would be left unmarred, filling from the front and the sides and the back and the bottom and all the angles left unseen, carving, carving, carving a lifetime into a legacy until you've chipped all the stone away and it doesn't even have to be there anymore because it's finally, frantically, been recorded.
