Killing Frost
Eight a.m. I am in the living room of the Johnny Gunter house. A beautiful full-moon night, clear as spring water and pebbled with stars, has passed into another day. In its wake lies the first killing frost of the fall. I’m alone with the murmur of a new green enamel woodstove sucking in oxygen in the way of all living beings. Here there is space for slipping quietly between the opposing forces of frost-riven grass and a hot stove, aided and abetted by a cup of strong but very mediocre coffee.
These are my first steps into the uncharted vastness of a new journal. This unwritten volume is pretty fancy, bound in black leather with my initials embossed in silver on the cover. On the interior page I wrote a short note to anyone who might find the journal dismembered from my body, explaining that these pages contain my life and that I would happily pay the cost of returning it. I did not say that reading further comes at your own risk. Scritching into these first blank pages seems worthy of a ceremony. Instead, I unceremoniously extract a snap-trapped deer mouse from behind my chair who was taking the liberty of shitting on the dining room table and in the silverware drawer. I recognize the unfairness. Staking my human claim in this marginally domesticated place in the heart of the Coast Range, the place where my own heart beats more freely, is ultimately selfish. Even so, the resident gray fox will be pleasantly surprised to find another easy meal on the altar of basalt slabs at the edge of the yard. They will undoubtedly reciprocate with a gray curl of fox turds, the final disposition of the unfortunate mouse. Last night was a killing frost.
I’ve been here for two days. My first job was unloading a bunch of artifacts recovered from cleaning out my childhood home after Mom’s passing last summer. The new junk in the mudroom is a disorganized pile of irony. Last summer our beautiful friends spent two days helping us haul eight full truck and trailer loads of accumulation out of here.
I brought in only half a load on this trip, leaving a net gain of seven and a half loads in the other direction. The rest of that first afternoon was spent getting the last piece of tar paper stapled onto the rebuilt exterior wall of the bathroom.
The next day began with a misty overcast that clung in tattered shards to conifer ridges. Vaporous silk gave way to cold sun-shatter and gray shape-shifting clouds scudding south on a north wind. I took the opportunity of a rain-free day to get three-quarters of the tar-papered wall covered with siding boards. Several boards need to be reinstalled for various operator-error reasons. As with everything in this mostly solo rehabilitation project, the tar paper and siding boards took three times longer than I expected.
This slow pace of progress runs in the family. Three decades ago when Kim and I became committed to returning to Oregon from the Midwest, Mom and Dad hatched a plan to rebuild and move into the Johnny Gunter house. We were to move into their house, my childhood home east of Springfield. They had grandiose ideas for the Johnny Gunter place. They managed to put in a new drain field, build a new fence around the yard and garden, wallpaper the bathroom and one bedroom, and overhaul part of the bathroom floor that I’m now redoing in full. But the project languished. Mom wasn’t about to leave her place on McKenzie Highway, and we had no intention of moving into it. Mom and Dad continued to come to Smith River regularly but spent their declining energy on chores around the outside. I remember occasionally being here when they rolled in, usually in the late morning. Mom would get out of the car, look around, then scrunch her face in frustration forged from overwhelm. I now recognize this as her version of sadness.
The woodstove presses heat outward against the chill of heavy frost lying over the meadow. Mom and Dad’s ashes are across from me in the living room. They lie in two ordinary pasteboard boxes, one silver, the other burgundy. Each is about half the size of a shoe box. They rest together on a birds-eye maple credenza built by Johnny. On our family cider day two weeks ago, several of us spent part of the afternoon transporting their ashes downriver. Using throwaway green and orange Gatorade cups (my mother would have approved of this unpretentious practicality), we scattered Mom’s cremains at the maternal family home site at Gunter and the ancestral Gunter Cemetery.
Then we traveled another half mile down the road to where a looping oxbow on Upper Smith River wraps around the place once owned by Mom’s father, John Perini. The place John bought from Dad’s parents, Edith and Roland Titus and therefore became the confluence of my maternal and paternal streams. The place where Mom and Dad lived in 1956 when John was dying of lung cancer in Eugene. The place where that winter they survived the death of their three-month-old son. Where later that year they uprooted their traumatized lives in a move to Seattle. I mixed Mom and Dad’s ashes together in my cup and cast the gray grit of them around three large bigleaf maples growing together below the road, their entwined limbs reaching over the tranquil leaf-drift waters of Smith River. In my mind, I second guessed the wisdom of leaving them in this place of so much trauma. Perhaps the maples will grow and help heal the old wounds.
On Cider Day we ran out of time before we could spread Mom and Dad’s ashes here at the Johnny Gunter property. Now they speak to me of the limits and limitlessness of time, of the boundaries for living and creating our stories. This morning I am still not ready for their final disposition. I’m waiting for a glimmer of intuition, an insight into how they can best become a literal and metaphorical part of the timeless future of this property. And I wonder, as I slowly and laboriously heal this house that has become a metaphor for my own story--what happens if I run out of time before my story is complete? How does the story of this place weigh in with all the other stories I am compelled to tell with my life? On this morning of the first killing frost, I confess to occasional feelings of desperation around the limits of my time. Yet holding an awareness of the vast continuum of life usually shrivels this narrow thinking.
From the wood-warmed living room, I see that Sun has cleared the eastern ridge. Icy grass sheds its frost, becomes illuminated, upright, and wet. There is work to be done.
For those who can join me, following are two November calendar events for The Nature of Gratitude project I co-founded with friend and fellow writer Eric Alan.
Sunday, November 12, 3 p.m. Tom and Eric host the eighth annual The Nature of Gratitude at Tsunami Books, with poet Jorah LaFleur and musical interludes by Halie Loren w/Daniel Gallo, Beth Wood, Heather Hutton, and Don Latarski. This event will support Tsunami Books and Bags of Love, a support organization for children in challenging cirucmstances. Visit their site to learn more and donate here.
Wednesday November 15, 5:30 p.m. The Nature of Gratitude performs in collaboration with the Spring Creek Project at the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library, with poets Jorah LaFleur and Charles Goodrich, writer Melissa Hart, and musical interludes by Halie Loren and Don Latarski. This event will support Stone Soup, a Corvallis community food program. Donate online here.
Thank you for your meditation-- you are becoming a good ancestor, your writing itself a place of grounding, holding the past, present, and future.
Always a pleasure to read these historic ramblings of the heart, Tom.