Letters from the dawn

My sister and I have just had another birthday, so I think over what I know of the autumn of our birth and my father’s travel south at that time. He drove to Baton Rouge alone to begin his first semester of graduate school at Louisiana State University. His Naval Defense Education Act fellowship would cover the family living expenses—modestly, but fully. My mother’s parents had given them a good used car and a gas card.

I know something about this, having done it most of my life, sometimes even for pay. The first way, the way most people do it—people who know enough about seeds and what happens with them when you add soil, sunlight and water—is this: You open up a patch of soil in spring in a sunny place, clear off the weeds and fork it up a bit, and you dig very shallowly, and you scatter the seeds from the cheapest packet of mixed colors you can find.

I’ve settled back into the doldrums of routine work, and the quiet drizzle and mist hanging over the hills to the southeast this morning draw me back to the fog and tall conifers of Marys Peak. Two weeks ago while we were in Corvallis we drove up to that place, the highest point in the Oregon Coast Range and a Kalapuyan vision quest site, and walked the trails.

All my life a friendly, ageless woman has accompanied me, waiting for me to grow up and meet her for coffee. I would visit her whenever I went to my grandparents’ house in Alton, Illinois, where she lived in a book on a shelf upstairs in my aunt’s old bedroom.

The gravel road north of us is quiet enough and crooked enough that I can go for a walk at 7 in the morning and not be bothered by traffic. Only a handful of people travel this way toward town for work or to take children to school or camp. They slow down as they pass, considering the dust, and wave from their Toyotas and Suburus.

Outliers from Brood XIX of the 13-year cicadas have been calling from the edge of the woods this week. I look for them on tree trunks at 5:30 a.m. and midnight, but so far I have found only their shells, five so far, all on the railing of the old front deck.