At times when I was young, more than once, I thought about what it would be like to get old. I remember one fall afternoon on my way home from high school, I was walking down the ridge road, enjoying the golden rods and pleasant weather, and singing the September Song. I remember the day clearly. I was just passing the old walnut tree that still stands in the field near the road not far from Donald’s house as I walked and sang.
In phone calls with my brother Donald during the past spring, he and I often talked about getting old and facing our Septembers. “You and me will soon be where the rest of our family has gone,” he said. I agreed. Confronting death is very serious and very sad. But when we talked together about being the last two remaining of our family, it was good not to dodge the seriousness and the sadness.
Donald must have been reminded of the danger he had encountered in Korea many years ago. “I think about my buddies a lot now,” he said. Nearing the end of life makes us think of the hardest and the happiest of times. Most difficult of all seems to be the thought of leaving the people we love. When Donald spoke of beloved ones who’d already gone before us…. Kathy, Mom and Dad, our sisters, our brothers, young nephews, service buddies, cousins, sister-in-laws, brother-in-laws, grandparents, old friends, neighbors, he said, “I don’t know where they are; I just know I’ll see them again.”
Then one day last spring when we talked, there was a lilt in his voice; his spirits were lifted. I thought maybe it had to do with the arrival of the new season. We chatted about how wonderful it felt when spring comes around. “Kathy’s flowers will be coming up soon,” I said. “They already are.” he told me. He said the weeping willow was almost in leaf now, and a little peach tree that Mom always called an August peach was blooming in the fence row. We talked about some flowers, like daffodils, that keep coming back each spring, even in the yards of abandoned houses with caved-in roofs and fallen down porches. I didn’t know that Donald was fond of flowers before, but we both knew it was heart warming to see how some plants resurrect themselves spring after spring.
But there was more than just the season that had made my brother more excited that day. Donna and Jimmy had taken him to see a hillside of blooming trilliums, white ones in full bloom, pinkish red ones not quite at their peak. They were beside a one-lane road not far from Mt. Olive over toward Waynesburg. “They were beautiful,” Donald said. Places we’ve known before have echoes, I think. Years ago he had gone over the same road with Dad; he had seen the trilliums in bloom then, too. The trail` had been part of the route that Dad had traveled when he carried the mail on horseback in the 1920’s. Donald also had carried the mail by car as a substitute carrier during the time his and Kathy’s farm house was being built (1980’s) . It must have been profoundly moving for Donald to share with his son and daughter just as Dad had shared with him. “Red trilliums,” he said, “are about the color of crimson clover.” I could just hear our whole family agree with him. From the time I was very little, I had heard grownups talk about how pretty a field of crimson clover could be. And then he remembered how Dad had planted it every year in the Ellen Bottom, a strip of valley ground, with a small creek running on one side, a special piece of property named for a former owner. “Crimson clover,” he said, “is at its very prettiest right before it’s time to plow it under,” What a pity, I thought, but that was what happened to cover crops, even ones full of blossoms. I could hear the pleasure in his voice as Donald recalled seeing those many, many red flowers. I’m rather sure he himself had plowed that ground when he had been a young man. In my mind’s eye, I could see the team of horses nodding their heads in time as they stepped and strained forward, pulling the plow that was almost as tall as my brother.
Often when he talked during the last few months of his life, it was hard for Donald to have enough breath. So every conversation was prized and priceless, every word retrieved from a memory still clear, still vivid with details. But, oh, I had so many more questions to ask him. Like everyone who knew my brother, I miss him. I really miss him. I hope there are trilliums and crimson clover and daffodils in heaven..