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Several times a week nowadays Carol and I drive the four miles from town, to see Dad at his farm, usually around suppertime. We don’t eat with him, most times, just attend to medical matters and converse a little, but sometimes we stay and watch the David Muir News with Dad and then head home again.
As we are leaving, when we come to the curve in the driveway, by the barn, I often glance to my left, that is, to the southwest, to where “Grandma Grossmann’s Oak Tree” used to stand. Gramma spoke for many years of making a little park around that tree, planting some grass and some flowers, putting in a bench or two, making a shaded place to read a book in the late light of a summer’s day when the farm chores were done, but somehow that park never came to be. We grandkids did climb the oak, sometimes, and might even have carried a book up into the tree on occasion, as there were some broad branches, not far up, that made nice perches and lookouts. This, I am pretty sure, is the oak in my famous photos of the barn in the snow, with the ’39 Chevy truck up close to the north side of the barn, though the patch of woods, mostly honey locusts, around that oak has changed a lot over the years, and I just looked at those barn pictures again now, and I am not entirely pretty sure after all.
But, anyway, as of today, that oak is only a raggedy, rotted, moist shell of a stump about eight feet standing and a whole lot of mossy oak branches strewn about, nearby. When Carol and I drive by, I quite often think for a moment about a certain day in the summer of 2002, when my daughter and I came from Hawaii to stay a week with my folks on the farm. Just before our trip, Elizabeth, fourteen years old at the time, had been poking around in some of her brother’s belongings—David had died two summers before that, when he was eighteen—and she found a Fujifilm 35mm film cannister with a few of David’s baby teeth that the Tooth Fairy must have paid for, long before, but had neglected to carry away. Some were teeth-teeth, and some were sparkly teeth, capped with silver or chrome or stainless steel, whatever bright metal Hawaii dentists used to use to repair enamel ruined when parents allowed a toddler to fall asleep while sucking on a bottle of juice. We thought it might be nice, Elizabeth and I, to “scatter” part of David on the Wisconsin farm he had so happily spent a lot of time on in the years of his brief life. So we did, and it was.
But I must tell you a funny thing, an odd thing, that happened at the scattering. Mom and Dad let me and Elizabeth borrow a little Chevy pickup truck during our stay with them. We were headed out, Elizabeth and I, late one afternoon, in that truck, and we stopped there on the curve, by the barn, got out, and stepped a couple of yards into the brush, and Eliz shook the little teeth out of the little Fujifilm can, shook them into her hand, and heaved them out toward the oak. They disappeared into the leaves and brambles. We murmured a brief prayer, gave thanks for David’s life, held each other in a quick hug, let some tears run down our cheeks, and did not stay but a moment more because mosquitoes were starting to buzz and bite. We turned back to the truck, and, lo and behold, we saw just then, just on the other side of the driveway, so close we could see every eyelash, a white-tailed doe, standing still and looking at us. We stood and she stood. The mosquitoes buzzed and bit. We took another step toward the truck, toward the deer, and she did not run but just stepped daintily into the locusts north of the barn, still turning back to stare as she walked. In the several days before that, we had seen dozens of deer—far and near—but that doe was the only one who actually approached us, and she came closer than almost any I ever recall, before or since.
Elizabeth and I wondered, of course, whether Dave had somehow sent that deer, and I do still think of my dear son and daughter when I’m on that wooded curve of driveway and probably will, still, if I should live so long, even after Grandma Grossmann’s Oak has crumbled into the earth of Grandma Grossmann’s Little Wished-For Park.
♦
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