From Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Year, there has been no snow, and so no trigger for the long, winding walk . . . the walk that lets my mind wander and surrender worry and dream the next turn.

Writing it this way, I see the welcome of the snow-walk is that the snow tells me when to take it. A storm interrupts and says, “Now.” Whatever work had occupied me at that moment must wait unfinished. (If I had had to schedule a time for review, it would not have been then.) The roads are impassable. No one will question the instant deferral of other tasks. Go then for hours through the woods and creek or along the city streets.

As I roam, I’d inventory the previous awards of snow and of their walks and of my situations at those times. I’d tie markers on my memories like the fluorescent ribbons on stakes, the surveyors waypoints. Think back and see the changes of path upon the peculiar timing of the snowfalls. Those hours prove to have been each the perfect time.

What are the usual brands that you come across in male enhancement reviews? There generic viagra store are different products that were produced to exclusively aid you boost your means and sexual performance. Early treatment of schizophrenia can have a huge impact on the sufferer’s emotion and health as well. levitra store There is no cure for this debilitating female viagra uk condition. When I noticed what was happening I focussed on the moment: the flickering torchlight on the steep and dusty track, the cold air entering viagra spain my lungs, the shape and feel of the penis skin, and fight other conditions of aging to keep the penis looking and feeling great. This morning revealed a snow overnight. Not much really, but the trees are all coated and the ground white.

Pardon me, but I have to go now.

(C) 2017 Bryan Dubois

 The Firey Gloom

I was thinking of things that had happened in the past, dialing back the decades twenty and thirty years. An old journal turned up these stories.

Bleachers, Downwards and Up – -December 29, 1987

About a year ago – it was probably a holiday for I have a custom of taking long walks on holiday mornings – I was on a walk along Rock Creek in the woods behind my old schools Carl Sandburg and Broome. I wound up at Rockville High on the football field. I climbed up into the bleachers and sat for a while thinking of things that had happened in the past. I counted the number of bleachers. Assigning each bleacher three years, I moved to the one representing my age then. I made a time line. I pulled pictures from my memory and placed on each bleacher the events of life: Rapid City, Jacksboro, Altus, first grade, high school, graduation, marriage. Time shrank. Three years is only a thousand days. When I take my boy out for a walk some holiday, I’ll take him to these bleachers and tell him stories. They will be his pre-history, exotic with the names of the places I’ve been. For me, the nineteen-fifties are distant and obscure. For my boy, my youth will be hard to place in time.

I wonder if there are some bleachers somewhere where you can sit in your spot and look up the rows to see what sits on them three and six years from now.

Pirates, Pirates and a Man o’ war – November 26, 1988

Yesterday, I had the day off since it was the day after Thanksgiving. We drove in the country, going up to Sugarloaf Mountain. Luke, 18 months old, gets so excited when we stop the truck and he thinks we are going to get out. He is quick to imagine things. I recall when I was five years old, I was on a ship with my mother and Grandma Hughes and others. We were sailing through alligator-infested waters. A pirate ship came alongside. A cannon fired. We were going to be boarded! I began to cry and hug onto mom. She and the others comforted me: It was only a ride. A ride in the amusement park. Someday, Luke will be frightened by something comparable. Someday Emily. And somedays I am frightened, too, by things that are not as real as they seem.

Perhaps the reason that I was so frightened on that ship was because even at that age, I had already some prior experience with pirates. It was on Christmas Day, two years earlier in South Dakota. I was three. My present was a book of a paper cut-out of a pirate ship, eye-patch and pirate hat included. Dad put the intricate ship together – Tab A in Slot B. I took the ship to the basement for adventure. I was plying the ocean when around the cape came into view an enemy ship. We exchanged cannon blast.   My ship was hit once, then again. It was disabled and then destroyed. Ripped into pieces!   Dad appeared at the top of the basement stairs and saw the debris. The ship had not lasted the morning. I got a spanking. Bad pirate, bad!

Computer Monsters at Meadow Hall — February 16, 1993

In the fall of 1969, we moved to Maryland from Massachusetts. I had just begun in third grade – eight years old. Paul was five. So I was started in school at Carl Sandburg Elementary, coming into the class a couple months after it had begun. I hate the ill feeling of being the new kid. Others already had friends and knew all names. The only name I knew was Brian Williamson as he lived just a few houses down the street. It was Williamson who first developed the figure he called “the computer monster”. This is a classic computer monster with its tracked feet, great teeth and menacing claws.   Finding myself those first few days among all these boys in class who, upon free time, would draw computer monsters, I joined with my own version. I have recollected it from memory. It had a tape drive for eyes and a less fearsome mouth. Once those boys saw it, I was laughed at, scorned for my silly attempt.

The older boys in the school, the sixth graders, told stories of the old mansion, Meadow Hall.   Our school was new and had been built on its grounds. The year before my arrival the empty mansion had been torn down. The others told of exploring it while it sat vacant. Some year later, digging among the histories in the Rockville Library, I found mention of Meadow Hall. It had been remarked by travelers on Veirs Mill Road as it stood proud on the hill top, stone stairways descending the hill to terraces that lined the mill pond. The only traces that remain are brickwork of a patio, foundation markings and stairs to the terraces, once the place of promenades, now overgrown in woods. It can be seen just east of Carl Sandburg, that is, on the cafeteria side of the building.

If you go there, also walk behind the cafeteria towards the playground. You will pass by the library. In there, they kept a bee-hive so the children could watch the honey bees at work. A tube led though the window. It was at that tube Williamson and I once waited to catch a bee for science class. But it was we who were caught by the principal.

Further around back, look for a giant tree with tremendous roots. We would spend many idle minutes of recess walking in circles on the great roots. Round and round, I’d tune out the many kids playing ball. I was at ease walking about on those roots under the tree or wandering the edges of the field looking for rocks. Seeing the lesser seen places. O, how I would daydream. I would imagine building clever little electric carts and zipping along. Or spread my arms and I became a B-52 lumbering over the terrain. How many lessons did I miss for being engaged elsewhere? As often as the teacher called my name a second time.

God has brought me along paths I no way expected, of daydreams and dreams and yoke-work and adventure. Now I have a boy who is nine. O dear Lord Jesus, call this boy. Let him treasure the many events of his boyhood. I pray for him each night, teach him all the lessons a nine-year-old boy needs.

Deep Devil Woods – March 13, 1997
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Karen was away this week in Florida and I had to work but we arranged for the children to stay with others for the days, two to one family, two to another. After studies, Claire and Emily would take walks with their friends into the woods and to their friends’ fort in the woods.

I retrieved the two and treated them to a stop at the candy store. Behind the glass were gold-coin chocolates. Emily and Claire hatched a plan. I bought some.   At home, we prepared the other aspects of the plan. Claire found a dark glass soda bottle and a cork. We made a cup of tea and soaked a paper in the tea, then let it dry, giving the appearance of many years.   Then Emily described for me in great detail the features of the woods approaching their friends’ fort. With a candle we burned the edges of the paper, then illustrated in ink a careful and elaborate map. Everything Emily described, I drew. The fallen tree, the creek, the steep bank, the crooked tree, the mud, the thick woods. Claire and Emily gleefully offered names: “Dead Man’s Cliff”, “Quick Mud”, “Deep Devil Woods”.

On the morning of their last day, the map, rolled up and tied and placed in the bottle, and a tin with the chocolate coins went with Emily and Claire. They did a super job getting those pieces out to the field and hidden in the woods in advance. Later, with the other girls, they found the bottle.

The map worked so strongly that their friends did not want to return to those woods.   They feared what they imagined.   Claire and Emily had not expected that.

The Firey Gloom – April 28, 1997

Last week, Claire sat in the front hall drawing and asked occasionally for the spelling of a word. Later, while I sat outside on the front steps, she came around from the back yard. She held out a paper, rolled up and tied closed with a piece of grass. She excitedly spoke, “Dad, I found this in a hole. What could it be?”   We broke the grass string and unrolled it.

We studied the illustration. She and I took it in hand and explored until we determined it to be of the front yard. Around the edges of the paper, we read,

“From the Firey Gloom to the Poyson Boosh; From the Ant Hill to the Hy Wedes.”

 Drawing lines between each of the pairs of landmarks, it was an elementary matter to find the “X”. We dug there. A treasure! Two plastic milk jug lids, snapped together, and holding small coins.

The Poyson Boosh was one of the azaleas. My favorite term was her clever, “Firey Gloom”. This was the lamppost. I do wonder how she pieced together such a wonderful – or dreadful – name, the Firey Gloom.

More Bleachers Upward — August 27, 2017

Thirty years and twenty years have passed since these stories. I had wondered, can you somewhere find bleachers and look up the rows to see what sits on them in your years ahead? Yes, ahead there are pirates and monsters and the deep devil woods. But there is also the light of the firey gloom, and under it’s good light, treasure.

 (C) 2017 Bryan Dubois

Sleepy Creek

Far up the Potomac and a world away from the suburb of our childhood was our vacation farmhouse.  A story for my nephew Ben.

If you were to start in the Chesapeake Bay and travel up the Potomac River, on your left you would pass Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington.  Then you would pass the waterfront city of Alexandria, then the grand house of Robert E. Lee, turned into a national cemetery.   On your right would be the city of Washington D.C.  From the river, you would see the Jefferson Memorial and a few of the public buildings.   Further on, you would pass Georgetown.   Then the river would get rough and you would encounter some rapids and waterfalls known as Great Falls.  This part of the river was familiar to Paul and me when we were kids, because this spot was eight or ten miles from our home in Rockville, Maryland.  A few times a year, we would go to Great Falls for a day’s outing, to hike or to fish.  We would climb on the rocks that overlooked the rapids and watch the kayakers dart down the sluice of rushing river.

Great Falls was the point on the Potomac where navigation stopped.  Boats could not get past the falls except by taking the canal that was dug alongside the river.  By way of the canal, barges could haul goods inland as far as Cumberland in western Maryland.  The canal was dug one hundred seventy five ago and stopped operation about eighty years ago, so by the time Paul and I came upon it, it had long stopped operating and remained as just an historical park.

Continuing, the Potomac winds back and forth as it falls from its source in the west, all along the way dividing Virginia from Maryland.  It goes past the Dickerson power plant, past Sugarloaf Mountain, and Brunswick.  Then on the left side, Virginia quits and West Virginia takes over.  Further the Potomac goes, toward the north and the west.

For ten years starting 1969, we lived in the split level house at 601 Twinbrook Parkway in Rockville.  All nine of us were together when we moved in, so that house was cozy and cramped.  The older three girls had rooms upstairs but your dad and Uncle Mathew and Aunt Lynn and I all shared the family room.  By day, it was the family room.  At night, we closed the doors and closed off from the rest of the house.  We pulled out hide-a-way beds from the couches and converted it into a bedroom for four.  We lived this way until the older three finally moved out and we got to fill the rooms upstairs.

In those days, I grew envious of some of my friends for the vacations they would take.  Some would go off to rented houses at the beach.  Such a vacation would have been too expensive for us.   We did go to the beach a few times, but only for the day.  Three hours out to the shore.  Six hours on the beach on Assateauge Island, then three hours back.  The thought that our parents would rent a house at Ocean City. . . that was an expensive thought.

But one summer, Mom and Dad did rent a house and we did go away for a week.  Mom spied a small ad in the newspaper.  A farmhouse was listed for rent by the week.  The rent was low, so we could go.  The rent was low owing to the fact that the house was not on the beach but was a distance inland.  How low was the rent?  The house was two hundred and forty miles inland.  That low.

The farmhouse was in the town of Sleepy Creek, West Virginia.   Where is that?  I will tell you where Sleepy Creek is.  Maryland makes a funny shape on the map.  Maryland looks like a crab’s claw that is reaching to the right and down.  If you go west, you come to the part of Maryland that narrows down until it is only three miles across, from north to south.  That is where you will find the town of Hancock.  To the north is Pennsylvania.  To the south is the Potomac River and across the river is West Virginia.  Go across the Potomac and turn left at the end of the bridge.  The road runs for several miles downstream along a train yard and past an airstrip.  Then it turns away from the river and through the tiny town of Sleepy Creek.  There is not much there but a few houses and a few worn out old buildings.  Through the town in a moment, we’d drive for some distance further to find the farmhouse that was advertised.

Old.  Old was the smell of that farmhouse.   The farmer was smart and built a modern house for his family and put the old house up for rent.  The house had the closed up smell of mildew.  In the closets were archives of books and magazines which fueled our entertainment on the rainy days.  There were Readers Digest magazines from the 1950s.  I loved to read old magazines for they opened a window on a time before mine.   The fifties were the years when my older sisters were children and when my parents’ marriage was young.  Ben, look at a newspaper from thirty years ago.   Read the advertisements for the every-day items.  Can you see how some things are still the same, yet other things have already become old and out of date?  What new things are there in our world that the old newspaper knows nothing about?

There were no amusements ready-made for us and there were no other tourists in the surroundings of Sleepy Creek.  Instead we found a hundred hidden amusements.  A hundred different ways to walk through a field.  Things to see we had never seen before.  The farmer plowed up a row of potatoes in his garden.  The plow blade sliced like a wave front through the soil and the soil rushed upward and poured around the curve of the blade as it passed.  Potatoes churned to the surface, as brown as the dirt except gleaming white where the plow blade had nicked them.  Back at home, boys our age might be fascinated watching an asphalt machine and an able crew put down smelly blacktop.  At our farmhouse, we stood staring to see potatoes being churned from their hiding places.

There was no television to tempt us to stay up.  Instead, not long after nightfall our energy would give out and we would be ready for bed.  Our room was upstairs which meant we started the night laying on the top of the hot beds in the still air, hoping for a thunderstorm or at least a breeze.  Unless there was to be a storm, there would come a period in the evening when the air calmed to stillness and hung idle about us.  The heat would slowly dissipate out the wide open windows and we would become sensitive to the least breath of wind as we drifted to sleep.  By the early morning, the air would have turned cool and heavy with dew and our covers, damp with the dew, would have found their way up and over us.

The very first light, even when it was still undetectable by us, would be announced by the throaty call of the farmer’s rooster.  Roosters don’t crow just once, I learned then.  But the first crow of the rooster was enough to convict Peter and it was enough to wake us boys.

We appropriated a vacation’s extra liberty and were permitted ourselves to go out of the house on our own.  But we would not exit down the stairs and out the door lest we wake the others and risk our liberty.  Instead, up would go the window and out would go the boys, out onto the roof of the porch.  Down we could climb from the trellis to the railing below.  I would go first.   Then I’d help your father Paul and then Mathew.  We’d cross the empty lane to the barn to watch the slopping of the pigs, the morning chore of the farmer.

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Let me tell you the things that would interest us on those tracks.  First, we would find fallen insulators from the telegraph poles.  Not the clear glass ones which were of no interest, but the old blue- or green-glass ones, the ones that went way back a hundred years and that had stood on those poles in service for all that time since.   When you visit your aunts and uncles, you may still see as decoration in their houses some of the insulators we found on those walks.  And we would find bones along the track.   A skull was especially valued by us boys, or a complete set of interlocking vertebrae.  And I cannot deny it was interesting to us, too, when we would discover a possum or a deer on the tracks that had recently been sliced neatly open.

O, the power and noise and rushing wind when a locomotive would charge past!  The sudden illumination of the signal lights, if we happened to notice, would be the first indication of an approaching train.  Then a distant rumble and throb of the diesel.  Then up ahead of us – – or behind us! – – we’d see it.  The single headlamp of the locomotive would bend into view.  We would cheer and bound off to the side of the tracks to wave to the engineer and wait for the blast of the horn.

But on those tracks there was a special find that kept our interest that summer, the glass marbles.  Walking on the tracks, on the oil soaked ties and stepping over the grime coated gravel and expelled slag, we spotted shiny glass marbles.  The first one or two we took to be fluke discoveries.  But we kept finding them as we walked on.  They were large marbles, about three quarters of an inch in diameter, made of clear green glass, and bearing bubbles in their interior.  We found them with such regularity that a long walk would fill our pockets until they bulged.   We would walk the tracks with anticipation of the next find.  Even if there were three people ahead of you on the tracks, the marbles had a way of escaping their attention and you would seem to have as good a chance of finding a marble as the person in the lead.

We never learned the real source of the marbles, but we think the most likely explanation is that they were the form in which rough-made glass was transported from the West Virginia glass-sand mines in that area to the refinery and that some of the marbles would work their way out of the hopper cars.  For some years after our first discovery, our family would make occasional day trips to “walk the tracks” and would still find marbles.  But no time in the last decade have I since found a marble on those tracks, even the special time a few years ago when I met your father in Hancock and we spent the whole day talking and part of the day on the tracks.

The road through the tiny town of Sleepy Creek passed a handful of residences and several old and unused commercial buildings.  Abandoned fuel tanks, concrete footers and cinderblock walls say there was once more commercial activity and that this town had a purpose in the past.  I’ve formed a theory from my experiences on the backroads.  It seems to me that seven miles was the average distance between towns, at least for the eastern towns of the past.  If you leave town on an old road, see if by seven miles you don’t come to another town or a stand of old buildings that look like they were once a market, a garage and a warehouse.  Seven miles is seven minutes today.   But a hundred years ago, it was two hours by foot, and not much less by wagon.

As the road left Sleepy Creek, it made a sharp curve around a grey weathered house that seemed to jut out into the roadway.  This house had an instant attraction to us and demanded we explore.  And so we came upon our second great pastime on that vacation, the exploration of abandoned houses.

It stood with dark empty windows, its exterior walls worn bare of all paint.  Looking in the ground floor window, the interior had been thoroughly stripped of everything interesting.  Around back we walked, pushing through the thick summer vegetation.  Behind the house were stone steps that descended to a water-filled cellar.   In a shed, we found the chassis of an ancient automobile, a Model A, with narrow, solid rubber tires and a flat windshield.

Navigating further around the house led us up a hill.  We found a great iron kettle turned upside down.  This was the kind of a cauldron that would have been used in the old days for making soap or for washing laundry or for rendering lard.  This kettle you will recognize, for we took it with us.  It had stood suspended from a tripod on the side of Grandma Martha’s house.

The second story of the house could be entered from the hill.  And this floor of the house had no stairway communicating with the first floor.  While the first floor had been picked through by any number of people who had entered it by the road, the second floor was still full of articles of life and work.  The first room we entered was full of tools for farming and for beekeeping.  The further room had farm supply catalogs and beekeeping magazines and personal letters and business letters all dating from the 1890’s to the 1940s.  We found in this room an elaborate decorative brick with images of flowers and deer, the date “1894” and the following name and address “Rev. M. L. Maysilles. 61. W. 3. Street. Frederick. MD.” which I have kept since.  (I lived in Frederick and there is no longer any such address.)  A special find: two one pound cans of saltpeter, which I took home and put to good use, but which I will leave to your father’s discretion to explain.

Abandoned houses were my time machines.  Coming upon a pile of debris left behind by the thieves and vandals, I would poke it apart with a stick until it gave up its story.  One house we came upon that year had just before us been broken into, its door hanging wide open.  In we went.  On the wall, a calendar hung, testifying “1956”.  Jars and bottles were still in the refrigerator.  The contents of the dresser drawers had been dumped on the beds.  Prodding with a stick, I found a driver’s license from 1938, a meat ration coin from WWII, and a pair of false teeth.  I think your father now has an antique Victorola cabinet.  Did you ever wonder where it came from?   Yes, here.

This was our Sleepy Creek vacation.  I’ve since vacationed at the beach.  But the beach resort is noise and crowd.  You can’t climb out onto the porch in the morning and you can’t walk on the tracks in solitude and spy a treasure overlooked by others.  The stores on the boardwalk don’t teach you about your father’s time and the time before him.  But say “Sleepy Creek”  and I remember those dewy mornings and I can see my parents and brothers and sisters up ahead of me on the tracks.

(C) 2005 Bryan Dubois