I wrote this poem a few years ago recalling a ridgetop above Somerset, at the end of a little dirt road where Hatch built a home-in-the-woods for us and our dogs; the house a jumping-off point to forest and high Sierra beyond. (photo: Horse Meadow 1971)
Forty-five Years, Counting
Enough bedrock mortars to prove we weren’t the first humans to watch sun rise over our ridge; more blackberries than I could turn to cobbler; as many trails as we cut through manzanita, only to see the red-bark close them up again; the furtive camps measured by coyotes and the fishing flights of Bald Eagle from her nest; watching sunset from the Druid stone; hide-and- seek with our dogs, and the midnight callouts; as many hammers nails wrenches as it took to build by hand a house to live in; more willow thickets for you to lose us in – the briefest flower meadow; Mountain Chickadees to fledge from our open palms; all this and more than I could count but as in a fairytale, where numbers are emblematic and don’t really matter compared to what we forget and what we remember.
~ Taylor Graham
