Saturday was a Celebration of Life for Hatch, with extended family coming from opposite ends of our West Coast and some old-time searcher and poet friends. I read this version of a poem-in-progress over years of our marriage:
For the Years, Counting
As many blueberries as we could pick when Grizzly wasn’t looking
and one King Salmon that fit perfectly in your hip-boot;
as many stormy hours in a canoe as loons thundering the lake;
a bedrock mortar to show we weren’t the first humans to watch sun rise over our ridge;
as many trails as we cut thru manzanita, & it grew right back again;
as many nails as it took for you to build by hand a house for us to live in;
as many hide-and-seek games with our dogs, and the midnight callouts;
one-night camps of coyote raid-&-howl,
and the fishing flight of one endangered Bald Eagle from her nest;
Mountain Chickadees fledged from our open hands;
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
