Dear George,
I mentioned on my blog post last week that our summer poetry group took up the task of writing about “where I am from”. Katja wrote about growing up in center city Philadelphia in a poem titled “I Am a City Girl”. I wrote about growing up at our home on the Menominee River and adopted a parallel title: “I Am a Country Boy”. It’s fun to view the two poems in comparison, and it’s hard to imagine such different backgrounds for a couple who celebrated their 62nd wedding anniversary yesterday.
Love,
Dave
I AM A COUNTRY BOY
In 1946 my father returned
from occupied Japan,
and our family moved from town to
my grandfather’s Norway Pine cottage
on the banks of the Menominee River,
a mile outside the city limits,
the first residents ever to live
on Riverside Boulevard.
Looking across the river from our front yard,
we could see the local cemetery to the east,
grand sunsets to the west,
and wild pigs on the island to the south.
My grandfather had died in 1942,
and the house had never been finished,
no electricity,
no phone,
no indoor plumbing.
We bathed in the river,
used an outhouse by the garage,
carried water to the kitchen
from an outdoor pump,
and lit kerosene lanterns at sundown.
I was 9, Steven was 5, Peter was 1,
and Vicki was yet to be born.
We shared our property with native species,
chipmunks, red and gray squirrels,
garter snakes, grass snakes, water snakes,
frogs and toads and box turtles,
snapping turtles in the river,
crayfish, bloodsuckers, mud puppies,
Luna moths and hordes of mosquitos,
wayward deer and wild turkeys,
foxes, porcupines, otter,
dead skunks flattened on the road,
pheasants and woodpeckers, birds of all sorts,
mice in the pantry, bats in the attic.
Six-foot pine snakes hid underneath the house.
In summer we children virtually lived
in the river and the forest,
building rafts of dead white pine logs,
camping along Little River at Mason Park,
scouring the woods
for deer antlers and snakeskins.
Our parents taught us the names
of the trees, the flowers, the birds.
I gathered wild strawberries for breakfast,
collected cicada skeletons from the river bank,
made ashtrays for my mother from river bottom clay.
We rowed our boat to Indian Island for picnics
with our Irish Setter Mike paddling along behind.
Steve and I had acorn fights in the autumn,
wrote messages in ink on birch bark,
pressed red and yellow leaves in thick books,
and, with the first winter storm,
held barefoot races in the snow.
The river froze over in December
and we ice-fished for perch,
shoveled off a skating rink,
hiked to Pig Island with snowshoes,
and followed deer tracks in the snow.
My father tied the toboggan to the Lincoln’s rear bumper
and towed his squealing children at terrifying speeds.
We chopped down our own Christmas tree.
made strings of popcorn and cranberries,
and tried to stay awake to see Santa.
My mother cooked whitefish,
Texas Tommies, and potato sausage.
When the ice melted and flowed out in April,
my father named the tinkling sounds
“Chinese Bells Day”.
In spring the rainfall turned the road to mud
and some days we got free vacations from school.
Steve and I played basketball after dark,
lighting the hoop with a desk lamp.
At 16 I built a hidden camp in the woods
from the trunks of alder trees and vowed
to live there by myself forever.
My father gave me Thoreau’s Walden to read.
Like Tarzan or Robinson Crusoe,
I had become a creature of the forest.
