Redwoods; Stout Memorial Grove, Jedediah Smith State Park
As some of you know, my maternal grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer about a month ago, at the age of ninety-two. After a short, precipitous downhill slide, he passed away in the wee small hours of this morning at his home in Bend, Oregon. It's exactly a month since his diagnosis which was, in turn, exactly a year after the death of my grandmother, his wife of over fifty years.
My thoughts are going to be with my mother and aunt today, as they make sense of the present. Though he was born and raised in Michigan, and in turn raised his daughters there, I'm glad my grandfather was able to die in the high desert country where he and my grandmother made their home in early marriage and returned in the 1980s upon his retirement.
This summer has brought back a lot of memories from the summer before my little sister was born (1987). The summer I learned to swim because we spent -- at least in my child's memory -- virtually every day at the "big lake" (Lake Michigan) trying to stay cool by staying wet. The summer we had bonfires and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows on what seemed like a weekly basis, carrying coolers and beach towels up over the dunes in tatty tennis shoes to avoid burning the soles of our feet in the scorching hot sand.
My dad -- who in another life must have been a DJ -- was the one who provided the boom box and mix tapes (yes: tapes) for these long afternoons at the water's edge, and this album is one that I will always associate with summertime, heat, sand, and the smell of food cooking on the grill.
Here's one of my favorite songs from said album.
The latest heat wave broke last night and we're supposed to have a more manageable weekend ahead of us -- hopefully I'll have enough brain cells left to complete all the half-finished book reviews I've got in my queue. Stay tuned!
