North of Boston

THEY AINT MUCH happened sence the last riting. The other day I gunned a four wheel drive truck through a bunch uv woods roads till she wouldn't go no more. Me and the logger left her and started out through the heavy hardwood growth. The sun come in lovely, lighting up the tall white birches and grey-green beeches like it was sum old pagan temple what you read about in scule. We worked for about an hour, seeing what was ready- to cut.

We hearn water running. There was a spring bubbling out frum under a mossy boulder. The water was crystal and so cold it made our teeth ache as we laid on our bellies and drinked.

Then in the deep woods we began to find stone walls, criss-crossing everywhere. There was orchards of old dead apple trees and cellar holes and long lanes with big thick walls and stone barn yards.

Finally we busted out onto a knoll that the forest hadn't took back. There was a little grave yard with slate head stones. One stone allowed as how a gal named Merrow, aged twenty-seven, was planted there back in 1832.

I stretched out in the deep grass and lit a cigarette and watched the cloud shadows on the mowntings and wondered about the gal sleeping in her sunlit grave, alone with the hill winds —what sort uf a babe she was and what life give her and what life took frum her.

Years of back breaking toil to clear the land and lay up them walls and build them houses and barns and plant them orchards had come to nothing. Now they was just a tiny clearing in the sun and a few'slate head stones. It was wun of them moments that gets into a feller's mind and goes around and around and dont get out. I wisht sum of you fellers had of ben on that trip. You might of liked it.