From the Bench

THE SKYLINE WON’T BE THE SAME ANYMORE

On a warm afternoon in early spring, with the redbuds beginning to exit stage right to make way for the dogwoods and azaleas, an old friend passed on. It was a good day, and a good backdrop, for dying, if you must.

A packed house came to witness her final act, and few mourned her passing, for, you see, to most she was not only well past her prime, but also worn out and ugly…..and useless.

Exactly how old she was, no one seemed to know, and you don’t ask a lady her age. Opinions ranged from fifty to sixty, based on memories of who drove a feed truck, or when daddy used to go there to buy sacks of feed. They were all guessing.

For the past ten or fifteen years, she sat by the railroad track, retired in place, a victim of changing times. Rot and decay, the osteoporosis of old buildings had set in. The sun and wind and rain had weathered her skin, rusting and flaking the sheets of metal til they rattled in the wind like a tubercular old man in the throes of death. But she refused to die.

The city wanted to put her out of her misery, but the railroad balked at the cost, and neither claimed custody. They battled back and forth, like siblings quarreling over what to do with Mama when she has become a bother.

Alas, there are no nursing homes for old feed mills.

Who, or what, administered the final blow, no one seems to know. It was enough for most of them that the deed was done.

With me, it was different. I loved her, and wanted the battle to continue, for the old mill had become a friend over the years, a testament to survival. In the early morning hours when I walked along Railroad Street, she was there, quiet in the calm, or gasping and rattling in the wind and rain. But she was always there…..for me, and for the pigeons and swifts and any other airborne creatures seeking a home.

She was there when I needed someone to pose with a sunrise or dusk. She was a beautiful model, completely without pretense.

She was there when I looked out the kitchen window, morning or night, winter or summer. She was there.

And most importantly, she was there at a time when I needed the assurance of something that is steadfast, that does not change. In that darkness that went with the ravages of cancer and chemotherapy, as I struggled back and forth down the driveway just one more time, determined not to quit, there she stood with her two children, silhouetted in the southwest sky, a monument to survival.

I will miss her.

The morning after the fire I went by to view the remains. I looked eastward toward a dawn she had watched for more than half a century. The old tanks stood as they had for those many years, two children searching for a missing parent.

It was a sad sky. A line from a poem by, I think it was Edwin Markham, came to mind. It was about the death of Lincoln, which the poet compared to a huge tree that falls in the forest, leaving "a lonely place against the sky."

I looked into space and knew it wouldn’t be the same again.

"Goodbye, Old Friend"