Heartwood

Here's a story I wrote.  It provides background into some of the events that shaped this bird lover and writer.
It tells of a treasured part of my childhood.

                                                        Heartwood

"It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving.  There had been jollity and peace and goodness."
Once More to the Lake   E. B. White

    The big Chevy pickup bumped slowly along the uneven Forest Service road.  My cousin, Larry, his wife Mary and I were squeezed into the front cab.  It was a hot, beautiful early August day in the Highwood Hills.

    "You know, Suz, there's no guarantee the cabin's still standing.  It could have been torn down or couldn've fallen down by now," Larry said.  He glanced at me quickly, taking his eyes from the uneven road.  "Florence and George's kids sold off the lease a few years after they died."

    Empty MacDonald's sacks, all that remained of lunch, rattled under my feet.  Mary held a Pepsi high to keep it from spilling as we rocked along the washboard road.   We were thirty miles from Great Falls, Montana, surrounded by wild land.  Quaking aspens leaned over the gravel road, their green leaves trembling in the warm wind.  Fields of wild flowers nodded in drifts of yellow, purple and blue.  A sapsucker hammered a fencepost near the road.  Red head flashing, he peered around the post as we rumbled past.  Steep hills rose around us in every direction with dark fir groves lining the canyons between.   Sparkling creeks ran carelessly over low spots in the road;  fords that now looked innocent and inviting.

   "We're getting close.  There's the old ranger's cabin.  Remember how he used to ride by on the big Palomino?"   Larry pointed to a tiny rustic cabin tucked into the trees on the left.

    I leaned forward in my seat, trying hard to see around the next bend, at the same time reluctant to see what might have changed.  I swallowed the lump in my throat.

                                                                            **

    I was nine years old in 1955, the first summer my mother sent me to her sister and brother-in-law in Great Falls.  I was a quiet, bookish kid.  I had spent little time outdoors at home in Oregon, due in part to a mother whose protective instincts could make a cow moose look careless.  And home was not a very happy place.  In Montana, things were diffenent.  I didn't think much about the difference, I just knew I loved being there.

     My cousin, Larry, was seventeen.  I thought he looked just like a movie star.  He wore white jeans and white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up to show his biceps.  He drove a convertible, had a girlfriend named Sally (with a ponytail like mine), and they could do the swing.  His life seemed full of parties by the river, dances and general hell-raising.  "Hey, Suz," he would say, flashing his white smile and giving my hair a gentle tug as he breezed into the cool house after his summer job.  He couldn't have been more exotic.

   His mother, Edna was my mother's elder sister.  She was soft spoken, gentle, witty and had a sweet laugh I could listen to forever.  I'm told that I'm a lot like Edna now- I'm happy with that.  She did her housework wearing my father's castoff rayon bowling shirts over her old dresses.  My mother used to include the shirts in our Christmas boxes, for some reason.  I can still see Edna, dust rag in hand, humming around the dining room in a faded yellow shirt, Chet embroidered on the left breast pocket and Schumaker Optical scrolled in green on her back.

    My uncle's name was Clifford, but we always called him Uncle Lover.  Not even Larry remembers the origin of that nickname. Another family mystery.  Cliff was a gentlemanly Welshman who seemed incapable of committing any impropriety.  Yet Uncle Lover he was, looking very much like David Niven strolling home down the shaded backyard path after a day's work at Montana Hardware.

    Close friends of Edna and Cliff held a ninety-nine year lease on a cabin on Federal forest land in the Highwoods, a ridge of wooded mountains outside of Great Falls.  My first visit there was over the July 4th weekend that summer of 1955.  The cabin is a little less than an hour's drive from Great Falls, but for me it was a trip into a new and beautiful world.  Driving the shady, forested road to Florence and George's cabin that first time: it opened my eyes and heart to the peaceful woods- a place I've held dear ever since.

   The cabin is nestled in a small grove of aspens, backed by a steep slope where fir and pine make an orderly march down to the creek that runs along the east side of the property.  A fire ring waits out back, complete with a circle of  stump seats.  When evening fell and the fire came alive, we would step out of the firelight to see the bats circle and hear nighthawks cry as they threaded among the stars.  There was pine smell mixed with wood smoke and bacon, mousy scurrying noises that may have been mice but probably were my cousins trying to scare Edna.  There was laughing, card playing, fishing, cooking and eating.  There was jollity, peace and goodness.

   I visited the cabin every summer for a handful of years.  I was in my early teens the summer of my last visit and I hadn't been back to Montana since then.  But the gift of the peaceful woods was one that I have treasured all of my life.

                                                                        **

   I picked up the phone one day a fewmonths ago, and heard  "Hey, Suz".  Almost forty years evaporated in the time it took to take a breath. Larry and I spent two hours catching up.
   "I want to come and see you."  It was out of my mouth before I could think too hard about it.
   "We'll take you up to Florence and George's"  he said.  "I haven't been up there in years."

                                                                       **
   I could see the silhouette of a cabin down the road on the right.  Light played through the trees, flickering and dancing.
   "This is it, see the sign?" Larry said, pointing to the neatly lettered sign above the cabin door, "Little Flower".  "Florence always liked that saint, wasn't it St. Theresa, the Little Flower?"  (Ours was a very deeply Irish Catholic family and community.)

    I didn't need the sign.  I knew this place.  The feel and the smell - the peace.  I knew the way the roof slope matched the slope of the hill behind, and where the big wood stove sat, how the side door let out onto a small fenced yard scattered with blue bachelor buttons.   All these angles and joinings were etched into my heart.  It was still neatly kept, newly painted, now with a small deck in front.  No one was there and there were no "Keep Out" signs.  We got out of the pickup and crawled through the barbed wire fence.

    It was good to be on that small piece of earth again.  I walked around, taking it in.  Pale wild roses still twined along the fence.  The bench lodged between two big alders was still in place.  The outhouse, a source of much teasing among the boy cousins, stood a bit farther back, the neat half moon carved in the door.  Aspens whispered the soft summer wind through their branches, and the stream winked and sparkled in the late afternoon sun.  A cow bawled at a ranch down the road.

    I thought about family and what the word means, and what we value about it.  For a long time, I had been leery of anything "family".  Just sentiment, I thought.  And trouble.   I was wrong. This was it.  Sweet remembrance of happy times.  I sat down on the bench between the alders and I heard Edna's soft laugh and felt her gentle hand on my shoulder.  I saw Cliff dealing the cards, pipe clamped in his teeth, teasing and prodding Florence to play.  Larry, on one of the bunks reading a comic book, was almost hidden in the down comforter.  And I was outside, sitting on the porch with knees pulled up, watching the swallows weave over the creek, the red-streaked clouds to the west marking the sunset.

   I heard the laughter.

                                                                      **

   The sun was low in the sky, its rays slanted out below purple-black thunder clouds that had stacked up in the distance.  Summer days around Great Falls often bring brief, saturating afternoon storms.  The shallow fords in the Highwoods become fast, low-voiced and deep, as heavy rains wash the steep surrounding hills.

   Mary joined me by the stream in the aspen grove. Early evening mist was forming and a soft, muzzy greyness filled the deep, fragrant shade.  A thrush called,  his lilting, ascending call echoing through the trees over the stream.

    "Glad you came?"   She asked, leaning lightly against me.

     I didn't trust my voice.  I nodded and put my arm around her shoulders.

    Larry tapped the horn in the Chevy.   We turned and walked back slowly through the deep green grass to join him.