Ocooch Swan Song

Spring peepers out the window in the sloughs by the river as I sit in the dark at my father's place at the dining room table and write this.

Dad's gone to bed - hoping to be up early and not miss anything of our last day on this particular trip. Jayne's downstairs with T, having agreed to have her in for a sleepover; Q's asleep in what used to be Jayne's room. About half the packing is done.

We had a memorable evening - post-supper, we all drove downtown to the park by the swimming pool, where Q and I tried to play catch with Grandpa and the football. But Grandpa couldn't see it well enough to catch it, and his shoulder isn't what it used to be for throwing. So he wandered off, and then I had Q go and round him up so the three men could go to the basketball courts half a mile away and shoot around with the much larger and less velocity-prone ball, leaving the girls to swing and slide.

Q did 75% of the shooting, but Grandpa got in there too, hitting a couple of jumpers once he'd learned the limits of his age and his strength again. He suffers with that, though he smiles as he does - at the end of the evening, when he, Jayne and I sat on a bench and watched T and Q zoom round and round on a merry-go-round, he summed up the basketball experience this way: "Well, I discovered yet another way I'm not worth a shit anymore." But he also reveled in watching Q hit some long jumpers and dribble his way past me (not exactly a difficult thing to do), and stood beneath the basket to rebound for him very happily. It occurred to me while we stood there shooting that I was five times Q's age, and Dad, ten times. We let that sink in with smiles on our faces as another shot swished through.

Back home, T ran toward the house in the very-near-dark, rounding the end of the car just as Blue, Dad's heeler-collie mix, raced around the same corner in the opposite direction, wildly excited at our arrival, and they crashed, T sprawling out into the gravel. So we had tears and an emergency treatment by Auntie Jayne of some abrasions that were vanishingly mild. That fragility combined with the sudden knowledge that she hadn't seen Mami in a while, and when she got on the phone with her, T started a long jag of gentle, shuddering sobbing against my shoulder. Which I did not mind in the least.

Grandpa had taken the kids on a long 4-wheeler ride just prior to supper, each one with binoculars dangling from the neck, down to the river bottom and around a maze of fallen logs to a spot where you can see the giant bald eagles' nest across the river. Q claims to have seen one, but Grandpa wasn't so sure. At any rate, the best thing that place had to offer was the chance to throw sticks into the river, and Q very nearly put a big one across, or so I'm told. Their return saw both Auntie Jayne and me snapping photos and filming like mad. I've never seen three happier people.

All this post-3:30, because that was when we rolled in from our five-hour drive from Uncle Jim and Auntie Sarah's house, where we'd been since noon the previous day. Drove all the way to Two Rivers, which I think is a fantastically picturesque little burg, because Baby Liam, as we call him (and who is now two and a half), just received a baby sister named Finley. She is perfect and gorgeous, and Liam is in love with his cousins. We all went swimming at our hotel the night before in their indoor waterpark (not one but two slides, a lazy river, wading pool, basketball pool, lily-pad crossing, and a hot tub), and then out to supper at a restaurant in the Lambeau Field atrium, and then this morning they'd played together for another couple of hours, and when we left, Liam cried stood in the yard with Uncle Jim and wailed profoundly as he waved goodbye. I will remind him of that scene in joking fashion when Liam turns his meathooks and brawn against mighty foes at Lambeau Field himself as a highly touted rookie defensive end. That kid is all power.

Auntie Jayne and I, then, had 10 hours in the car over two days to talk and catch up, and did we ever. It's been great to get to know her better again these past few days. My fantasies of a life here are bubbling at a full boil now - every trip up on the hill on the 4-wheeler shows me a new are where I'd like to clear the trail better, pull up all the honeysuckle (I actually pulled some at various stops along the way - thanks, Mark and Ronadh!), cut some trees to improve the view, fix the fences, build a horse barn...And then reality comes back in and I know I'm not here anymore. And haven't been for a long, long time.

Poignancy!, thy name is Gays Mills.

Pictures and films to follow - be patient, they'll be worth it...