10/17/2025
Well, we don’t have original pine floors…
we have original Douglas fir floors!
Intact, not a squeak or soft spot to be heard or found. It’s moving to look at the wallows in the boards where generations of folks have walked, where Parley Finch himself has walked. To see the floor of the old soda fountain where Ann’s grandma sat on her high school lunch break drinking a Coca Cola. To see the tight, straight grain of Oregon fir and think that we met in Oregon. To feel the connectedness in things, to understand how close life really is.…there is a poem that has been sort of a mantra for us on our journey these past few years and today the words ring especially clear:
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.
~Wendell Berry
