PITCHIN' (part 2 )

   Grandpa kept himself busy in the barn, finding little chores - the ones that always need doing but mostly aren't important enough to hem and haw about. But a stir in his worry over Grandma has brought the barn's atmosphere to a sticky weight, and he lost his patience for inventing time killing reasons for not doing these things.

   Unable to bare the anxiety further against his concern, he surrenders what he thought was better judgment to the distraction of his heart. He finds Grandma in her kitchen, apparently busy with the same inventions as his in the barn. He watches her quietly from the doorway, a wonderful habit of his that she loves because he knows that she knows he's there.

   'Did you finish up your business out there?" She doesn't need to turn around from the sink where she had been keeping herself busy, and it was still too light outside to see his reflection inside the window but she looks for him there when she asks him.

   "Oh, you know - a bunch of nothing special things to forget, I guess. I thought you might need some help cutting vegetables or something."

   "No sir," she says, taking a sponge to the counter top tiles, " I just heated up some left-over soup."

   He sat himself down at the kitchen table not knowing exactly what to do. Hearing her Husband's chair drag across the linoleum, she tossed her sponge into the cleanest sink in the county and took her own seat at the table.

   He saw that she had been crying. They reached for each other at the same time. Their hands came together at the middle of the table. She squeezed and he squeezed back.

   "I'm sorry about your truck," she said.

   "Oh, hell. I got more miles with you than I do with that old truck."

   "A lot of good miles, old man."

   "More than not," he agreed.

    Her smile brought him back a little bit, back from the shadows of life that he had hoped would dissipate over the course of time.    But living never seemed to get any easier with age, a tragic mis-conception among twilighters expecting smooth seas and cotton underwear.

   "Let's lay our cards on the table, Orval. You and I have been dancing around the elephant in the room and the music stopped a long time ago."

   "I reckon you beat hell out of the elephant earlier this evening," he said.

   She chuckled through the seriousness of the day and said, "I admit that it's been awhile since I've done any pitchin'. But I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. I'm sick of the doctor's and their needles and pills. But I'm mostly sick of the bills."

   "You can't worry about the bills. You just have to concentrate on getting better, Ruby."

   "Life has gotten too expensive, Orval. And the pills aren't making me any better, they're just giving me a little bit more time."

   "Isn't that what life is all about? More time?"

   "Not if it's more of the sickness. Not if it means hocking the farm to pay for medicine."

   "The farm isn't anything to me without you here, Ruby."

   "This farm was here a hundred years before I was born and it will be here a hundred years after I'm buried."

   "There's too many ghosts 'round here anyways," he quibbled.

   "This family needs a home place, especially in times like these, Orval. And one more ghost might cheer the place up," she said, playfully giving her husband a kick underneath the table. She's finally able to pull a smile across her husband's face.

   "I don't mind dyin', Orval, but I do mind leaving you."

   "Well, I mind you dyin'!" I've got sixty-some years put into you, Ruby."

   "I hope you aren't expecting sixty more! I'm near worn out by now and you're a sight south of the Prom King I took home to meet the folks, Orval."

    Outside, the darkness of the evening found the kitchen. The breeze brought it's coolness through the screen door.

   "Almost another day done, eh?"

   "Just two crazy old coots sittin' in the dark," she says, leaving the kitchen table for the stove where the cook pot waited. "How about some soup, Orval?"

   "Soup sounds good."

    Three copies of the same picture hang in three different homes across the States. Taken from the end of the driveway looking south up a gentle slope, it is a moment in time that was caught in the younger years of a little Oregon farmhouse. Dominating the front section of the home is a Victorian style porch that Great-Grandpa 'Swede' had built himself with lumber milled from a patch of pine that stood down the holler.

     If you grab a closer look, you can see the porch swing where Grandma usually sits, Grandpa next to her when no-one else is about, but his rocker just a step or two near when folks are spellin'. Grandpa's rocking chair, handcrafted by his father's father, creaks along with the floor boards of the porch - and Grandpa's bones when the winter throws cold.

    Grandma and Grandpa raised three children here and worked hard doing so. The parents didn't want the farm to be their limitation and the soil and the seasons, the blood, sweat and tears of then and previous generations, allowed them their choices.

    So from the farm, three other homes were born and from those others still, beyond the fields and fences, all the children of these pictures whose roots reign here, are remembered.

    Some have strayed, some have stayed. Some live in the difference, and some have found their way back home.