Father, husband, brother, uncle, friend… A very very very good man.
(obituary)
June 30, 1926 — June 11, 2012
Category: family
road trip
This is a posed picture. My mom can walk. Works on it everyday. Big cerebral event two months ago. She hadn’t been in a car in nine weeks. What American does that? Beautiful weather, I proposed a test drive, “where would you like to go?”
She said, “I’d like to see my brother.”
So we did.
Drove across town.
Pausing for a
photo.
SGB and JSD
reminds me of this
Hail Mary
Watched Charlottesville marathon runners in their twenty-first mile course down Woolen Mills Road Saturday. I try to avoid sport similies, metaphors and analogies, they are verbal shorthand, they cheapen speech. (I’ve recently received a lot of schooling on the Creed of Golf so I have little appetite for hearing sports=life.)
I admire the grit of marathon runners, their persistence. One foot in front of the other. To the end.
life is like that
GEC WHE
Gray and the Colonel both loved working with nature, in nature, the worse the better. Slash and burn, plant plant plant. Lucky are we to be alive, in the garden.
Rest in peace
first time
My sister loved work. Visited Sylvan Nursery yesterday, one of her workplaces, first time ever I have been there without her.
Bought a sourwood or sorrel tree, Oxydendrum arboreum, the sole species in the genus Oxydendrum. It’s a Virginia native.
The first time I bought a sourwood, Emma, Helen and I planted it in Gray’s front yard, on her 45th birthday. This 2nd one goes in my oak-heath forest on Market Street. Hope the roots whisper to each other across the 459 mile divide.
Back to Gray’s I looped south to the ocean and west by way of East Beach Road. The section of road destroyed by Hurricane Irene has been reconstituted.
old girls
Always treat your parents as if they are close friends who are soon to move to a distant land from where it will be impossible ever to
return. Never take them for granted, no matter how busy life gets. You can’t imagine your mother and father dying. And then they do.–Tony Parsons
Moving
My brother Sam is under the knife today, reconstructive surgery on a busted up foot. Getting old takes a lot of strength and grace.
stories
The great grand-daughter and the great-great grand-daughter of the lady who built my house visited last night.
They visit partially for love of place and because they value a tradition where tales are told to succeeding generations of preceding generations.
Who will tell your story?
Who will give a tinker’s dam.