Last time home

Last time home

Last time home was dismal although a bit therapeutic.

We went to see my parents’ graves and others’,

decided we should drive by the old house in Menan.

We drove slowly, noticed the sheds had been torn down.

The raspberries were gone too, same with the garden

and the old cement mixer that had mixed

more yards of cement than I can remember.

Mrs. Butterworth and Mrs. Beyeler were gone

too, gone long before. I do remember shoveling snow

at both their houses, watering their lawns,

and even hunting night crawlers, all entangled

after a good water and a full moon, waiting nonchalantly

before we grabbed and tossed them into bait cans.

I wondered whether the new people have ever heard a cow,

bellering to be milked or about my horse, three-years-old

and green broke, that died. We dragged her out to the field

with the Massey Ferguson tractor, both legs tied tight

 with a chain from the barn. We had dug a deep, deep hole

over a few days, beneath a giant cottonwood.

We had said a few prayers and then shoveled the dirt on top of her.

I wonder if the new people know about the asparagus

that grows wild along the ditch bank that waters Hunting’s property.

Still, I wonder whether anyone remembered the woods

between Hunting’s property and Spring Creek, the pheasants

and magpies and the skunks and the little boys who roamed

those woods, thinking they were Daniel Boone and other fur trappers.

I wonder if the new people have ever hunted green heads

down along Spring Creek in the dead of winter

when your breath cracked every time you blew it out

and the incredible snow drifts that filled the ditches

and the swamp that allowed us to make snow forts and caves.

I wonder if the new people know how many raspberries,

potatoes, chickens, pigs, tomatoes, and rhubarb we grew there.

By that time the wondering waned—actually it never wanes—

we had crawled past the old place, the fence now leaning

closer to the ground than I remember. Much to my chagrin,

it’s not the same as we aren’t the same—changed

so subtly by our environment and life gnawing at us

from the outside and from within, slowly, deliberately.

Our memories now gnaw on us, growing

ever more grandeur than they ever were—

or should have been. But they are our memories,

fed by lazy clouds, fishing in Spring Creek,

and tag out back under the weeping willow.