Wading through a Sea, Memory, Time

Memory of a Wagoneer and a Winter, 1981.

There was a winter storm that hit us during our second year on Layman’s Hill. A big one, the biggest storm we ever saw there if my memory serves me correctly. It was January of ‘81 and Elaine and I had just driven the kids back up from visiting their grandparents in Raleigh, North Carolina. We had that Grand Wagoneer, cream with the beautiful fiber wood-paneling. Not something folks from this generation would find particularly appealing, but it held a quiet and rustic elegance to us back then. Gates had said it would get by during the cold Vermont winter and it did for the most part, save a spin-out here and a jumpstart there. How it purred up and around the hill of that long driveway. I remember a warm satisfaction in the feeling. Returning at dusk from a day of teaching or writing at the college. It’s gentle grinding, so steadily in the darkness after picking up Thames from practice. Returning him to his mother and a hot meal. Such quiet reflection in the beams of those headlights scanning the white stillness. A sort of blank canvas for the young man’s life I often thought.

I sometimes wondered if he ever saw it that way. Or if the hunger and homework and sweat were more than enough to consume his thoughts after a long day of algebra and athletics.