Cuttin' Up Rough
Noah and his mother Delilah were out for a ramble. That is what Little Mac, Delilah's father, had loved to do and that is what he had called it and so that was what they called it, for he was evermore in their hearts the spark that got the engine going.
"You know I'm going to school where Grandpa taught, right, Mom?" Noah said, as he and his mother stepped carefully from rock to rock close down by the water where the rocks never dried out completely.
"Course I know, son," said Delilah. "How could I forget?"
"Well," said Noah, "Grandpa, he forgot lots of things. And sometimes he membered 'em, and sometimes he didn't."
"It didn't matter," said his mother. "We loved him anyway, didn't we?"
A gust of wind and spray hit them and Noah stopped and held on to his mother. "We did. We do. And it makes me sad and sometimes angry when I hear him get called crazy at my school."
They stood on the rock till they could move again and not be made to slip. "The world is full of thoughts, Noah. Isn't it?" said Delilah.
"It is, Mom," Noah said. "Sometimes too full."
"But when we do what he would do, when we ramble, and when we walk where your Grannie Bertie would walk, it doesn't matter, does it?"
"No ma'am, it does not," said Noah, resolutely in his high and reedy boy's voice, keeping a firm grip on her hand as he moved ahead. "No ma'am, it most certainly does not."
1 February 2020
Texas Jim
Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca