He was a man for the mountains. He was so very young. He had old man’s hands, criss-crossed with many lines, sharply square shoulders, and a sweetly quizzical smile. He loved yoga and running, and his singing voice was sweet.
We met and fell into a mad passion, in the spring time. But he lived in another land, and there was never enough of substance or confidence between us to sustain a love connection for too long. He spoke another language, in so very many ways.
One time we climbed the Berg Lake Trail, spent a weekend camping together. Brown butterflies kept landing on me, sipping salt from my skin as we walked the high ridges. I saw mystical signs and animals all around. He was surrounded, too, one morning on the cookhouse porch, by ground squirrels intent on high-jacking his oatmeal.
It was a shooting-star summer, a fling i foolishly imagined into more than it was. He was too young, too many mountains away. And i, like the old poet sang, i was much older then. I invested our brief time together with an unwarranted depth and significance. But one thing, one moment, one gift, was deeper and truer than anything i could imagine:
A family friend – we called each other sisters – was staying with me. Her husband had been brought down to the Cross clinic, a desperate shot at some treatment that would work. The night she found out they were releasing him, so he could die at home, she arrived back at my house just after my sweet singer arrived, in town for a visit.
Sis walked in, told me the news, asked me to sing her a song.
Please, a song, for her own heart was too heavy to sing it herself. I took the guitar. So many times she and i’d sung together. Now, no songs would come.
And then that boy from the sage lands, that mountain singer, he gently picked up the guitar. And for a woman he’d never met before, he sang, sweet and true, a song for her and her life’s great love, father of her children, who’d not live to see 42.
When he began making plans for a cross-country journey i had no way to join, i knew it was coming to an end. We had tickets to a concert, and on the way there, we broke up. Still, when he left town, he asked me to keep some things for him. I said no. I didn’t want any physical bookmarks, any excuses. If he ever returned, it would have to be just for wanting to see me. I have never seen him again.
But in the spring time, i hope his road is sweet with blossoms. And in the high summer, i wish him the cool of mountain streams. And in the autumn and the darker seasons, i hope he is singing, with other voices wrapped around him, in a place full of the kind of light that lasts. And if my memory is one slight glimmer in that light, well that’s okay then.
All My Relations
ams
Wow. Visceral. Visual. Poetic. I do believe you’re getting better with age.
And watch out for those darned hijacking squirrels.