This June it looks like Ireland in Mount Shasta, or at least, like Seattle. It has been raining (and hailing and snowing) for weeks so everything has that intense saturated green foliage color you only get when the sky tones are dim. Iris are just beginning to open out, and fruit to set on the pear, cherry and apple trees in the garden.

Around town, individual tree pruning of all the down wood we got back in the late January storm, has given way to the big commercial arborists with their boom trucks, up and down all the streets in our part of town pruning street trees away from the wires. This morning an old california box elder I have admired out my front window in all seasons, the one that reflects the late day's golden light back to me, got sliced down, chunk by chunk. I watched the two hard hat guys up in their cherry-picker whack it up and heave it down into Frank G's yard like too-thick slices of Pillsbury dough off a frozen cookie log. Well, oh well- it really was rotting from its center. It would have come down onto the auxiliary power line next winter again just as one-quarter of it did in January, leaving me without power for six days. Still, I'll miss its golden leaves in October, and the shield it provided from our huge dry sky, all summer.

Down at the south end of town at the old mill yard, there is about a football field's worth of dead trees just like it, piled up to a depth of six feet and more. That's a lot of wood, and shade, waiting for the chipper. Well- oh well! We all become dead wood ourselves sooner or later if we live long enough.

Brother, Where Art Thou?

On April thirteenth I got a cheery e-mail from sis-in-law Linda. The middle brother of my family, Pete Bogle, recently had three TIAs--mini-strokes, basically. Oh, brother! As it turns out, he is fine now. His body adjusted to its blocked artery. He's receiving all the appropriate care and pharmaceuticals. Nevertheless ... Since this handsome specimen of American manhood (see above) is two years six months my junior, I've been thinking too much about The End Of Things.

You'd think I would have been done with this already. Winter 1992, after rolling my pickup on I-80 on black ice at 65 mph, I fell into a prolonged Death Trip that stayed with me much of that following year. Once on the other side of the process of sorting things out I was glad, even smug, about what I thought of as my firm grasp on the reality of my own temporariness. This one is different, though. This is family; which in most ways is seriouser than if it were myself. Pete's doctor says he's perfectly healthy except for the 100% clogged carotid: heart fine, cholesterol fine, blood pressure under control. He's barely retired, too. Both my brothers have always been fit. Pete and Bob were both serious runners for a long time; Pete switched to swimming some years ago, and I believe he's regular and serious about it.

I, on the other hand, treat my gym membership as some Catholics and fundamentalists reckon up their baptisms: as if being a card-carrying member were enough to save you. I haven't had a real workout routine for years. I don't walk that eight miles a week they all say will stir up your brain. Truth is, I have always hated exercise, largely because I'm bad at all forms of it that I have tried so far. I have even temporarily given up my life long yo-yo dieting habit based on the (accurate) observation that it encourages my anxieties about body image.

The thing is, while any one of us might or might not be maimed or die in an accident, odds are that we won't. If we don't have a sudden death, though, the odds of deteriorating health and a long age of increasing limitations are about 100%. Chronic/recurring ailments become the most likely prospect for us well cared for boomers. While I've been calling myself a geezer since I began to get MediCare, I haven't truly felt old, just a bit creaky. Here's a piece of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" on the subject of endings. Not cheerful verse, but thoughtful. Besides, he quotes Julian of Norwich's "All will be Well," which makes up for a lot of gloom.

from LITTLE GIDDING:

"Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age

To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.

First, the cold friction of expiring sense

Without enchantment, offering no promise

But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit

As body and soul begin to fall asunder. [...]

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment

Of all that you have done, and been; the shame

Of motives late revealed, and the awareness

Of things ill done and done to others' harm

Which once you took for exercise of virtue."

On a lighter note: to hear a bit of a really funny tune better known as, "Can I have all Your Stuff When You Die?" go to CD Baby, at this link,

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/mgoj1

and play #1,"Last Words." Or go buy Marley's Ghost's CD, "Spooked."

Mountain Springtime

This is the wettest Spring I can remember up here. This morning it was snowing on the muscaria and dog violets in the lawn, and overcast enough, at two in the afternoon, that when I came out from an afternoon appointment I found I'd left the headlights on. Which called for a run on the freeway to charge the battery. I drove down to Dunsmuir, to Tauhindauli Park, a green spot on the Sacramento River that's been restored to its natural vegetation. Umbrella in hand, I walked over underneath the double freeway bridge, listened to the trucks roaring North and South high overhead. The river is high, too: - high enough that a kayaker, there in wet suit to put in, took a couple of looks at the white-water, and repented:- hopped back in his pickup and left instead. So then I just had to drive back uphill the six miles to see the river further upstream, a thousand-some feet higher in elevation at Box Canyon Dam. I've been checking the spillway for a few weeks to see how much water there is over the dam. This was the first day there was a large waterfall of it, loud, massive. At this rate, Shasta Lake will be full pool soon. (Yesterday the lake level was only lacking twelve feet of totally full.) Water isn't just a symbol of abundance. It IS abundance. Maybe tomorrow I'll drive up North Fork road until I hit the snow line. That's as far up-river as I get in my non-4WD sedan.

DRY YEARS

Look for a little cloud, like a man's hand

Rising from the sea, an end of drought.

Some curse was said over us--as to Elijah

After many days the word of God came--

So also to us, worshipping images,

Puzzling over secret aridities.

Someone says: surely heaven's hand shall bless,

As He approved Elijah's holocaust,

As He consumed the doused half-beeves, the twelve soaked stones.

We're listening for sounds of rushing water

To sheet the Carmel plains with runoff,

For dry years to end, for words to have meaning.

Then if I stroke your face I have touched you.

Then they can plant the Delta rice again.

Trout may be let swim, unsalinated.

The Son of Man says: The wind blows where it listeth.

On us, not knowing whence it comes or goes--

Here or on the coast--but never where most needed,

In the hills, from where our help is said to come.

The lake's concave fingerlets still crack dry,

While TV screens show joy in drowned autos.

What's to break loose next? We wait, watching where

White water whirlpools, marking wrack beneath,

Let sorrow flood, acceptable disaster,

Heaping trash on fence posts, seeking its level.

Iowa, 1993