Читать книгу Rover - Barry Blackstone - Страница 9

A ten-year old boy stood silently gazing out a second story window to the road that ran through the Sugar Woods (the forest that separates the two halves of the Blackstone homestead). A herd of black and white cows were grazing lazily in the pasture just cross the barnyard. But neither the path nor the pasture caught the boy’s eye that particular morning; he merely stood and stared ahead, seeing with his mind rather than his eye the stream that lay on the other side of the ridge. He had climbed the flight of stairs in the middle of the rambling farmhouse to his corner bedroom to change his cloths for hiking. As he stared out the window in introspection, his mind returned to the stream that ran through his hometown of Perham, Maine, especially the section which flowed through Bragdon’s (next door neighbors of the Blackstones since 1861) back field. It was a favorite place, even though it was a two mile walk one way that is if he stayed to the main road. If he cut across the back field and through the woods, it was a lot shorter. It was a beautiful day for a hike, and with his barn chores done, he would go!

He stood and stared a few more moments, then turned and left his room. He quietly descended the stairs until he reached the main floor of the old house his grandfather had bought for his parents in the late 1940’s. The boy left the house through the front door that opened to a huge porch that ran the entire length of the home. Climbing down the porch steps, the wanderer headed down the grassy incline that lead to the path which would take him to the Russell Place (a series of fields bought with the house and barn from a family called Russell). By the time he made the pasture his favorite boyhood friend, a dog called Rover joined him. Even as they left the yard, he could hear the distant sounds of the forest that lay between him and his special brook. As they neared the woods behind his father’s cow barn, the sounds of nature grew louder and louder. On many a day he had played with his Blackstone cousins and the McDougal boys (neighbors) in the same forest lane, but today he wanted to be alone with his dog on this adventure to Salmon Brook. For on this day of contemplation, the lad wanted only the voices of field and forest, stream and sparrow and his best friend to interrupt his thoughts.

Twenty minutes later the boy and dog were crossing the lower end of the pasture just below the milking shed (where the Blackstone milked their cows in the summer). They made their way up the small hill to an orchard he had often hunted partridge in, just behind the Dickinson Homestead. He and his cousins had often taken the same route checking the fence line, or cutting the tall grass that often shorted out the electric fence that keep the Holstein herd in the pasture. But today, they bypassed the pasture and orchard in favor of the beckoning brook on the other side of the woods. Turning right, they walked the length of a hay field owned by the Bragdon’s, before once again entering the woods by way of a field road that lead down to the stream. It seemed whenever his mind turned serious; Rover would focus him back to the sound of the stream before him.

With the pleasant memory of a stream and a dog still fresh in my mind, I end these thoughts of a yestermorn with this Biblical challenge: “The memory of the just is blessed . . . ” (Proverbs 10:7) Is there a more precious asset than a good memory? As I compile this series of articles in which my boyhood dog Rover is at the heart of each chapter, I am battling the reality that my father has lost most of his mind with dementia. As he nears 93, his mind is just about gone (and his life left him on February 7, 2017), but it amazes me just how many memories he had left. That is why I write, lest I forget these precious memories with my dog Rover.