Children Picking Up Our Bones

Our uncle, Hans, died.  He was 91.
Now only his older brother, Harold,
lives to represent our mother's siblings.
He is 95.  I wish him a long life.

It must have been nearly a hundred years ago that our Norwegian immigrant grandparents created a farm middle in the forested lands that are western Washington.  I do not know exactly when they built the house that seems to me to have been there forever, although it cannot have been; the house that Hans almost never left; and never far.  I remember how electricity came to that house.

Carl Larson tore up the floorboards in the rooms where the family slept, and ran wires through ceramic tubes, and anchored them taut with nailed insulators.  I suppose, if the house is still there, and if the floors are still there, that the wiring and the insulators are there, too.  Carl Larson let me squat and watch, and tried to explain to me what electricity was.  I still do not know.

Later, when we had a car, my Dad sometimes took me with him to visit Carl Larson, somewhere in the woods, on the other side of a large gate, down a gravel road.  I learned that Carl knew a lot about electricity.  Once, he had built a radio transmitter, and had been forced to stop using it because he did not have a license.  His farm, like that of Hans, had been his parents, and like Hans, he simply stayed there until he died.  The radio transmitter was gone, and some of his teeth were gone, but he had a lot of dogs, and his house stank from them

There were other old men.  When our parents bought the small farm that had belonged to the Seastrom brothers, Pete stayed on until he died.  Ben Thompson lived on the Kapowsin Road a bit east, and into the woods.  He lived alone, too.  He had prospected for gold in Alaska, and we heard, or imagined, that he had saved enough money to build a house, and never have to work.  Maybe it was so.

Ole Gunderson, also from Norway, had lived with, or near, our family since before we were born, until he died.  When Dad needed lumber, he bought it from the Rawlinson brothers--four of them as I recall--who might also have stayed on after their parents died.  I am not sure.  For most of my memory, they were--all four--bachelors, too, like Hans, and Carl, and Ole, and Ben and the Seastrom brothers.  But one of the Rawlinsons married:  I think it was the brother who drove the truck and made deliveries.  Once he showed me a well on the sawmill property, where he said they had put a live trout.  He thought the trout was still there and, several times, I almost saw it.

There were a lot of old bachelors in our lives.  I do not remember that it seemed odd, as the years have come to make it be.  Perhaps we were not far distant from other species, where all the young males are driven off, and have to fight their way back for the attention of the females, and that some of them never do; not quite, not permanently.

I suppose, someday, our grandchildren, and our nieces and nephews, will think of us, and see what we have assumed, and tell remembered fragments of what we are.

I think it is Wallace Stevens who wrote:

Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill; And that in autumn, when the grapes Made sharp air sharper by their smell These had a being, breathing frost; And least will guess that with our bones We left much more, left what still is The look of things, left what we felt At what we saw. . . .  .