Does it matter if we’ve seen their gravesites in person?
Does it matter if we know his name?
Does it matter if she or he was killed a hundred years ago or just yesterday?
Does it matter if it’s brand new out of the box or has seen years of trials and hardships and challenge and war and every kind of effort to destroy it?
The United States of America is your country. It has offered you opportunity whether said opportunity was easily accessed or hard-won. It has protected you from those who would imprison you for disagreeing with them. It has given you freedom. That freedom was protected by people you don’t know doing a job you didn’t have to do. Be grateful. Acknowledge the goodness in fighting an enemy seeking to destroy. Give them honor.
First of all, I apologize to the driver of the burnt orange car the color of the Boston Baked Beans candy I like so well. My leisurely speed of 72 mph down Highway 10 near the Soo Line Trail was clearly too slow. I wish you clear roads in the summer, iceless roads in the winter, and short jail time when you cause an accident.
Secondly, to the engineers who erected the cement divider nearly as high as my window and to the astute highway department who posted the sign “vision may be limited” on the curve out of Elk River: What were you thinking??
Third, to the person whose distraction nearly caused them to take the left fork to Duluth rather than to Minneapolis, I say, “Keep your head in the game. You’re in the city. There’s actually traffic here and it’s fast.” Oh wait. Never mind. That was me.
And that was just the trip home. I was away briefly to a dear spot. Said spot’s water hadn’t been turned on for the summer yet. The electricity was, though, for which I was grateful; having worn what amounted to a miner’s helmet a few nights last year during some work which required it be shut off. It was fine, perhaps a bit quiet. It was not quiet when those near and dear to us discovered our plight and laughed rather more heartily than necessary as far as I was concerned. But I digress.
My brother knows all things house-related and I, well I can paint if it’s not in an important area. He was down the road in his own cabin, but he was very busy. I would turn on the water myself. I had done it before with him on the other end of the phone line coaching me, and had written it all down. There was around an hour of daylight left, and I felt only slightly hurried. I pried up the part of the floor reserved for such descent as I was about to make, lowered myself through it to the cold dirt underneath and with the lantern in one hand, crawled on my stomach in great GI Joe form if I do say so myself to turn the levers under the sink. They had already been turned. Out I crawled again, pushing from my imagination thoughts of small, furry, scampering things and slithering … okay I can’t even finish writing this. You get the idea.
I went to the sinks to turn the knobs all the way on to let out the air. They were already turned to on. I checked the list, and moved to unscrew the aerators on each faucet. They were already off. It was at this point I astutely realized someone had been here before me and already done these things. All that was left was to drain the hot water tank, put in the filters and put the pink stuff around them so they wouldn’t leak. I didn’t see any filters nor the pink stuff. So you know what this independent woman did, don’t you? That’s right. She texted her brother who came over and confirmed there were no filters and that it was too late to buy them.
It’s not so bad to be without water. We didn’t have running water there all during my formative years. The outhouse hasn’t moved anywhere. I did notice there was a dead mouse in the anti-freeze in the toilet. I respectfully closed the lid. I would give him privacy to lie in state.
I closed the doors to the bedrooms to preserve what heat I could through the night, lit a fire in the fireplace, watched one of the last nights of David Letterman, and slept on the couch.
Why, you ask? Why even leave the comfort and peace of my home for such a drive for such an overnight?
This.
Even this.
And for peace of mind and reflection, this.
Because, after all, some things are worth the trouble.
The hallway was a sea of papers thrown every which way as a final act of celebration, defiance, or peer pressure. He reached down and picked up one of the stray papers on the floor. It was crumpled and had two shoe prints on it, one nearly smack in the middle and one leading off its right hand corner. It was comical, really – this annual act of chaos, for what was school if not ordered and organized?
He thought back through the years. He recalled the early years of preschool and kindergarten where he made friends, said goodbye for the day with high fives, and happily absorbed first things like making paper costumes for holidays and counting to one hundred. Memories of home school years with his sisters were a collage of songs about fractions, and reading assignments in the tree house, and timed tests, and the quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog typing lessons. He thought of the Middle School years when all around him tried to fit in while feeling out-of-place. And here he was – in the High School hallway he’d walked through countless times. He looked around. The halls were quiet now. Everyone had rushed outside to linger over last goodbyes for the year and then jump into summer with both feet.
What was it really, this routine of sitting and listening and reading and writing and studying and testing? What was the working out problems on a sheet of paper? What was the rehearsing of lines and notes? He stared off in the distance, turning it over in his mind. The future could hold more of the same if he chose, and he did. But not the same. Sitting in a class was a small part of learning. It provided building blocks. But how to use those blocks – that was the real assignment. And how to live his life – that was the true test.
He was on his own now. He would decide what to study just as he would decide what paths to take and which to leave untraveled. The shoe print smack in the middle of the paper? It wasn’t his. But the other one, the one beginning its own trail? A shadow of a smile crossed his face. If it wasn’t his now, it would be.
Photo: Joe Mabel [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
