Forty degrees in May
Grandpa built houses along these roads, repeating the ritual
his father and his father’s father before him started when they converted old Dutch
farms into blocks of land for the mill workers to live, houses popping up like
the gravestones in the Lodi cemeteries where most of them later got buried.
This is the place Grandpa came with his lunch bucket and
fish hooks, striding out into the water before the paper mills and chemical
factory spoiled the fish for eating, cool water washing over his heated feet,
if not here in this beach above the Broadway Bridge, then downstream near Post’s
Mill at Outwater Lane where the river is walled in by the pink brick of the
paper mills and rising spirals of steam from their massive smoke stacks, cool
water on a hot day, his fishing rod fixed between his fingers as he dreamed of
what might have been, had his father not died young and his mother had not
needed him to work and he could have gone off to university as planned, leaving
his mark on the world in houses rather than the George Baily visions he once
had.
My uncle tells me these things as he casts out his hook in
the hope of catching something neither one of us can eat, going through the
motions his father went through, coming up as empty, even when our hooks manage
to take hold, me assigned to removing the slithering victim to send back for us
to catch again, 40 degrees in May, water still too chilled to warm my feet
though I ache to, my head filled with what might have beens, and what might
still be, or perhaps what may never be possible.
Comments
Post a Comment