path: root/glb.txt

Great Lakes Book 

# Notes


A woman plants trees and hemp so that someone of his descendants will be able to build tall ships. We meet him as he comes out of a lawyer's office in Milwaukee, the cold spring wind is blowing down the street. The lake is still frozen, icy clouds billow in the wind. The snow on the ground is patchy though. He drives out to his land is walking among the young trees and fields cleared for hemp. Oak trees and pigs, he's a pig farmer. Regenerative ag. His farm is growing trees for an ark his descendants will build. Long view. Re-incarnation view.

# Prologue

Death was standing in the corner, as he often did. He didn't bother her, he never had. Death was not a stranger, how could death be a stranger when you're 98? Death is patient. Death is rarely in a rush.

What puzzled her was that no one else seemed to see him. She noticed the nurses in their starched stiff shirts avoided looking in that corner. She couldn't blame them. They were young. They didn't want to see death. Still, you'd think with their jobs they'd recognize him for what he was, that old guardian of the gates.

"Did you hear Ms tk?"

She turned her head back from the window. "Forgive me doctor, what were you saying?"

"That I can't release you."

"Oh that. So you're going to hold a 98-year-old woman against her will are you?"

"No, I can't hold you against your will."

"Then you mean I am free to go?"

"That's just what I am saying, I cannot let you go, I don't believe you would live long without our care."

"I don't believe I would either," she said cheerfully. "That's why I want to go."

"You want to die?"

"Doctor, I have lived 98 years. I don't want to die, I rather dislike dying in fact, but I do plan to do it with some dignity, certainly not here, with all these," she gestured at her arm, "tubes and wires and nonsense."

The doctor opened his mouth to say something but then, stopped and closed it. She met his gaze unflinchingly and tried to focus on showing him something that might change his mind. "I'm sorry," he said finally.

"What for?" She smiled at him. 

He smiled at her. "I'll be back to check on you tomorrow."

"Oh." She nodded. "Well, Doctor, try not to be too disappointed if I'm gone then." She glanced at Death. He wasn't there anymore.

The Doctor closed the door softly behind him. Thought I'd never get rid of him she muttered to herself. She pulled the tubes out of her arm, took the blood pressure cuff off her other arm, and unclipped the heart monitors. She leaned back and shut off all the machines before they started beeping. She lay there in bed for a moment. It wasn't like when she was young, leaping out of bed to start the day. For the last ten years there had been no leaping. It was more a shuffling these days. She missed leaping. She wanted to leap. She wondered if she could leap. 

She sat up slowly and slid off the bed to the floor. It wasn't a leap, but a slide was something. You take what you can get. There was a bag sitting in the chair on the other side of the room. Her her daughter had brought it earlier that morning. She walked over and unzipped it. Inside was a new shirt and a pair of pants. They were ugly, but they would do. She put the bag on the floor and sat down to pull on her pants. Wouldn't do to break a hip just before you're supposed to die. 

Once she was dressed she put the bag and couple of towels in the bed and pulled the covers up over it. She stepped back and looked at it. It didn't look much like a person, but then again they never noticed death so maybe they wouldn't notice her being gone either.  

Her feet were still in slippers and made no sound on the tile hallway. She could hear the nurses talking down in their station. She walked as quickly as she could, but it was harder and harder to draw a breath. She quietly opened the stairway door and slowly let it click shut behind her. She stood at the top of the stairs, panting. Slowly she descended.

The icy wind was a slap in the face. Spring was always that way in the north country. Step outside, and get a slap of cold in the face. She smiled at memories of childhood. Memories of cold spring mornings, running through the woods, the crunch of icy snow breaking under her boots. The smiled faded. She would miss the snow. No she wouldn't she thought, she doubted she'd remember snow at all. It would be a story people told of the olden days. The days with cars, the days with snow.

Her daughter was waiting under the light pole, just as they'd agreed. Her daughter had furrowed brows as she settled herself in the passenger's seat. "What's wrong?"

She shook her head. "My brother is never going to forgive me."

She smiled. Her son. She loved her son. "Everyone is on a different path," she murmured. She could feel her daughter's glances, like the alternating plowed fields and forests pulsing by out the window, all still wreathed in white. "I will miss the snow I think," she said again to herself, but loud enough that her daughter caught it.

"Mom, it's hard enough that I am doing this. Don't make it more morbid than it is."

"Oh dear, I am sorry. I had forgotten." She turned to face her daughter, looking closely at the slight lines beginning to form at the edges of her eyes. She did the math in her head. Sarah was thirty two. "I forget that when you're young you still think you are doing things in the world." She sighed. "I rather miss those days. Not that there isn't plenty to do at my edge. Good lord I think I have done more this year than I did in my 30s, but I no longer have the illusion of it being me that it doing them."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, I don't mean to be coy Sarah, but I can't tell you. I mean that literally. It is impossible to convey. You won't understand anything about this drive until it is your turn. If you have the luxury of choosing." She reached out and tucked a small strand of her daughters hair back behind her ear. Then she pretended not to notice the tear at the edge of her eye and turned back to the window. 

It was nearly dark when they turned off the last paved road. The cabin was another ten miles of unpaved road, rutted and ice. It took almost as long as the highway driving. But from up here she could see the lake in the winter. She felt bad about her daughter having to drive back in the dark. She would have asked her to stay the night, but there wasn't time. She lit the stove with old newspapers and dry kindling by the stove. She made a pot of tea and they each drank a cup, sitting side by side on the porch swing, her daughter's head on her shoulder just as it had been all those years before. Before what? Before now? Was that all? Time was a funny thing. Then, gently as she could, without trying to hurry her too much, she packed her daughter in the car and got her heading back down the icy drive toward the city.

This was what she loved about the winter. The absolute silence and stillness that doesn't end,but slowly drifts through the night and into your sleep. She drank another cup of tea on the porch, staring up at the stars and out at the lake, it's stilled edges still locked in ice. It will be breaking soon she thought. She got up and walked down the hill. It was hard walking on the crusted surface of the snow. She slipped and came crashing down on her thigh. She was half surprised there hadn't been a terrible crack of breaking of bone. She rolled on her side and tensed and relaxed muscles and felt around her leg. There was pain, but not so much that she thought anything was broken. All at once the absurdity of it hit her and she laugh back laughing. When she opened her eyes everything was stars. They seemed so impossible close, bright and sharp, yet cold, clear. She shivered. And then she noticed him. Leaning against the tree. He looked different now, more human, less abstracted. He looked somehow polite even. Like a man waiting patiently for the restroom she thought. She thought she even saw him smile at this thought. Here then? She turned her head to the side and looked over a grove a birches. They were young trees, but well established. She turned her head the other way, down the slope toward the lake. She could see the scrawny trunks from here. Grow she thought as she rolled her head back up to the sky. Grow. Like the stars. So many. So many trees. So many stars.

# Chapter One

The wind was from the North. She sat up suddenly. The north. The wind was from the north. "Mother," she yelled into the hatch. "Tell Papa the wind has shifted. Comin' fr'up noth." She laughed imitating the old accent. 

The old man was one deck in beat, vaulting out of the hold with lightness that belied his age. He had no hair, but for some stubble around the back of his head. His skin was a deep brown, whether by nature or by sun was unclear since he had never been out of the sun. He was of medium height, but had a boxer's lithe build and a sprightly manner of walking that reminded many of a fighters.