Status: In the works...
River Through the Spruce
Chapter III:
Wise men say “at the end of your life, you may recall its beginning.” Though, how wise can the men be to conjecture such a protestation without wisely taking in account how few of us have the time to recall ones life at the end? For some, death may crawl slowly on all fours over our hospital beds. With cold fingers which the years have brandished the prints from. Those same fingers clutched the fingers of the hands whose entire existence depended on your own. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. All unable to lay their eyes upon this gentle monster whose sweetly stinking breath hovers above you each night. Some of us are even lucky (or unlucky enough) to keep the cognizance of mind into the sunset of our lives. Those final days marked by the dismissal of functions which you’ve never known a day without. So frightfully close at the end of your life to the beginning of it. Losing what you had only ever lost once and not truly lost as one cannot lose what had never been gained. Eyes film and shade within its milky sheath.
For others, death comes like a dropped curtain mid show. Long fell the unripe fruit tripped up from the spring tree. Left to rot in the earth in vain hopes that it may someday feed the tree that both birthed it and destroyed it. The audience chant their distress at the abrupt ending. Those may ask why its necessity, why it must be done? Yet, they dare not to ask the puppetmaster in the case that their string is the next chosen for severance. A few may ask who holds the strings yet none contend that the strings are held in a grasp much bigger than their own.
As a child sat upon her grandfathers knee; the world extended no larger than where his cherry pipe tobacco could reach. Around them, the world was changing. Metal and glass began to grow around the trees and brush like a plant all its own. An invasive vine named ‘necessary innovation.’ It spiraled forward until it tickled the very clouds and when it could go no further; it spread open its thorny wings. She could still so distinctly remember the way her grandfathers work-tanned skin would crease and press with the surge of thick brows. A man of little words; the mere action spoke of what he felt when more scaffolding appeared across the distance. The same landscaped he could have painted from memory, the same one he’d seen at least a million times before. It was changing and so was the world; so they all were.
“I don’t understand it. I don’t think I ever will.” He began one night. Fingers that hadn’t washed clean of grease since the 1960s would reach for his box of wooden matches. “But it’s not for me to understand. It’s not my world anymore…my world is dyin’ but yours isn’t. This will all be yours and I suppose this will be what you need now.” He’d reason. In time, his metal rocker had evolved into a wheelchair. From there, every few years the wheelchair grew bulkier with its extensions and necessities much to his chagrin. Maybe much too ironically mirroring what he saw on his landscape.
Her grandfather wasn’t a man to speak often but his charisma grew with his Schaffer consumption. That night, his lips were stained with the foam of the third by the time he summoned up words and his pipe.
Fireflies had been unusually off-kilter that year due to an unusually off-kilter spring. The deep frost had prematurely erupted into a stretch of week long heat worthy of early June. However, no sooner could the red-nosed masses cast off their coats had it turned away. The cold returned far too early and refroze the earth and all of its weary, northern-hemisphere tenants including the fireflies. Those tiny, little bugs who had been falsely lured into safety had been snuffed out just as rapidly. Now, they wearily returned, altogether smarter for the ruse.
Fascinated, as all children truly are, these tiny insects speckled the yard like stars that could be held. The previous night, she had spectated as several of the neighborhood kids collected at the breach of her picket fence boundary. They had been capturing fireflies and pulling off their lights. Whether it be unattended childhood curiosity or barbarity was anyone’s guess, but she’d watch as they’d smear the contents of that yellow glow across their cheeks and foreheads. Like some kind of warpaint, the deviants glowed for but a second. With a heavy heart and a guilty conscience, she had sat beside her grandfather in a heavy silence. She thought of all those fireflies now estranged from their families. Nothing else left to make them special from any other bug or creepy crawler. What would they do? Where would they go and would their families recognize them?
“Pop-pop…what happens to fireflies if they can’t glow anymore?” she’d finally conjure up the effort to ask. The sun was drooping lower and lower in the sky. Supper had come and gone and now the clashing of plates being cleaned rang like church bells from a screen door. She casted her gaze upon the man, the audible ‘pop pop’ of his pipe before it was transferred to the corner of his lips. He was searching, looking for an answer. Something appropriate for children away from necessities despite the gruffness of his typical character. Her grandfather had never been the sharp-tongued, rugged man of legend. Though she had no doubt that such a man existed within him, she had always merely known him as who he was with her.
“Well…I think maybe that the fireflies that don’t glow…ain’t supposed to be seen anymore.” He’d begin, seeming to search for something to grasp onto before somehow seeming to know. “They’re still there though. It’s kind of like when someone dies…the other fireflies can’t see those ones no more but they know they’re there…and being watched.”
For others, death comes like a dropped curtain mid show. Long fell the unripe fruit tripped up from the spring tree. Left to rot in the earth in vain hopes that it may someday feed the tree that both birthed it and destroyed it. The audience chant their distress at the abrupt ending. Those may ask why its necessity, why it must be done? Yet, they dare not to ask the puppetmaster in the case that their string is the next chosen for severance. A few may ask who holds the strings yet none contend that the strings are held in a grasp much bigger than their own.
As a child sat upon her grandfathers knee; the world extended no larger than where his cherry pipe tobacco could reach. Around them, the world was changing. Metal and glass began to grow around the trees and brush like a plant all its own. An invasive vine named ‘necessary innovation.’ It spiraled forward until it tickled the very clouds and when it could go no further; it spread open its thorny wings. She could still so distinctly remember the way her grandfathers work-tanned skin would crease and press with the surge of thick brows. A man of little words; the mere action spoke of what he felt when more scaffolding appeared across the distance. The same landscaped he could have painted from memory, the same one he’d seen at least a million times before. It was changing and so was the world; so they all were.
“I don’t understand it. I don’t think I ever will.” He began one night. Fingers that hadn’t washed clean of grease since the 1960s would reach for his box of wooden matches. “But it’s not for me to understand. It’s not my world anymore…my world is dyin’ but yours isn’t. This will all be yours and I suppose this will be what you need now.” He’d reason. In time, his metal rocker had evolved into a wheelchair. From there, every few years the wheelchair grew bulkier with its extensions and necessities much to his chagrin. Maybe much too ironically mirroring what he saw on his landscape.
Her grandfather wasn’t a man to speak often but his charisma grew with his Schaffer consumption. That night, his lips were stained with the foam of the third by the time he summoned up words and his pipe.
Fireflies had been unusually off-kilter that year due to an unusually off-kilter spring. The deep frost had prematurely erupted into a stretch of week long heat worthy of early June. However, no sooner could the red-nosed masses cast off their coats had it turned away. The cold returned far too early and refroze the earth and all of its weary, northern-hemisphere tenants including the fireflies. Those tiny, little bugs who had been falsely lured into safety had been snuffed out just as rapidly. Now, they wearily returned, altogether smarter for the ruse.
Fascinated, as all children truly are, these tiny insects speckled the yard like stars that could be held. The previous night, she had spectated as several of the neighborhood kids collected at the breach of her picket fence boundary. They had been capturing fireflies and pulling off their lights. Whether it be unattended childhood curiosity or barbarity was anyone’s guess, but she’d watch as they’d smear the contents of that yellow glow across their cheeks and foreheads. Like some kind of warpaint, the deviants glowed for but a second. With a heavy heart and a guilty conscience, she had sat beside her grandfather in a heavy silence. She thought of all those fireflies now estranged from their families. Nothing else left to make them special from any other bug or creepy crawler. What would they do? Where would they go and would their families recognize them?
“Pop-pop…what happens to fireflies if they can’t glow anymore?” she’d finally conjure up the effort to ask. The sun was drooping lower and lower in the sky. Supper had come and gone and now the clashing of plates being cleaned rang like church bells from a screen door. She casted her gaze upon the man, the audible ‘pop pop’ of his pipe before it was transferred to the corner of his lips. He was searching, looking for an answer. Something appropriate for children away from necessities despite the gruffness of his typical character. Her grandfather had never been the sharp-tongued, rugged man of legend. Though she had no doubt that such a man existed within him, she had always merely known him as who he was with her.
“Well…I think maybe that the fireflies that don’t glow…ain’t supposed to be seen anymore.” He’d begin, seeming to search for something to grasp onto before somehow seeming to know. “They’re still there though. It’s kind of like when someone dies…the other fireflies can’t see those ones no more but they know they’re there…and being watched.”