A HARD PLACE TO BE IN
A gray-brown, cool, flat, pocked oval,
the biggest rock in the stone pile along the
north fenceline of my grandparents’ Wisconsin
farm, is so big, my grandpa claims, that neither
the old John Deere nor the team of draft horses
that came with the place in ’46 had been
able to work it free from the sandy soil
where it had lain since the
glaciers put it there.
Grandpa hired for one hundred dollars
in 1950, he says, a man with a bulldozer
to move that one stone to the place where
it now rests beside the driveway.
My cousins and siblings and I
called that stone the “Picnic Rock.”
Shaded by oaks and grapevines,
we spent many a summer noon
hour on the Picnic Rock, four
or five kids drinking Kool-Aid,
eating sandwiches and Oreos,
bickering and bragging and
at last growing drowsy enough
to lie down upon our table
and listen to bugs buzzing
and a breeze rasping its
way through the tasseled corn.
The rock was big enough
to dream on. Big enough
to depend upon. Oh, I’ve
seen changes on that farm
as years go by: the machine
shed east of the silo lies now
in a heap upon the ground. The
crick, once quick and clear and
cold, is but a dirty trickle now,
and there’s no point in putting a
fishline in it. Gramp and Gram?
They’re slowing down. “I’m just
sitting here wondering when I’ll
kick off,” my grandfather told me
on the phone last week. He’ll be
88 this June, and he’s been talking
that way as long as I can recall,
but now I think maybe he means it.
I take my son most summers to visit
his great-grandparents and the farm
I love. He’s eight years old. We
walk together up the driveway, the
boy scuffing through the fine, pale
sand to raise clouds of dust for no
particular reason that I know of, and
when we get to the Picnic Rock, we push
aside the raspberry brambles and climb up
on the stone. We lie back, side-by-side,
father-and-son, and look up beyond the
treetops. I’m not sure what my
kid sees. But me, I can see
all the way to Heaven.
♦
This poem is presented here in memory
of the author’s paternal grandfather,
Earl Franklin Grossmann
June 13, 1902 — June 5, 1992
♦
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