"Unsettled": Preface Poem?

To give you a better understanding of the timing of this series (and an explanation of why it's taking more time than usual to write), it may help if I mention that this Thursday is the half-year mark since Mom's death. This past weekend all of my siblings came from the Detroit metro area to our house in west Michigan for a three-day get-together (culminating with the best fireworks we've ever seen). Lots of early morning chats over coffee, evening bocci on the lawn, and late-night talks by the campfire. It was a relaxing change of pace for all of us.

I have begun writing these "Unsettled" posts as my siblings and I begin the difficult, sad, reflective business sometimes called "the settling of the estate," which includes the question of when to sell the homestead. We are fortunately not under any particular pressure, but we are realists and know that as soon as is prudent... someone else will be calling our land "home." If so, I want to leave a draft of these chapters on the kitchen counter of the house. If they were to someday need a preface, I might settle for this short piece below that I wrote many years ago.

It would be especially fitting if the title, which I've not settled on, indeed remained "Unsettled," because the storyline makes use of forms of the word "to settle" (or unsettled as the case may be). Set can be an adjective meaning "established" as in "he was set in his ways" or "the date was set." It can mean "equipped to proceed" as in "We were all set to begin." Set can also be a verb (e.g. "the cement began to set"). The verb "settle" can mean "to take care of" as in "to settle an estate." It can mean, to accept something less than what was hoped for as in "he settled for a place in the suburbs."

In this story, settle often uses the meaning: "to make a homestead of unsettled land as the "settlers" did.

And obviously settle can also refer to how things are finally resolved, how they "end up." It is for this latter reason that this short poem with its line "...dust is a kind reminder that some things settle on their own" may be a fitting preface to these unfolding chapters.

Bookmark

Sorting through some attic shelves
(in search of something else)
I came upon a book
I’d left half-read some summer past.
A memoir of a life it was
that evidently held
less interest than my own
once the clock began again.

In truth it seemed not long ago,
and though I do not know
whether I passed time
or time passed me,
dust is a kind reminder
that some things settle on their own.

And as I brushed away the proof,
my finger caught the corner of a bookmark,
a photograph I must have used
to hold my place those many years ago.

How strange to find it there—
a snapshot I’d forgotten
of a memory all but lost
until…
I took the bookmark in my hand
and, happily, it took me back
and made me laugh again.
© Copyright 2007, TK, Patterns of Ink

Photo Note: That's me in the left side of the tractor bucket (with my friend Bob J. and our BB guns). Dave and his friend Don E. are on the back fenders, and my little brother Jim is in Dad's lap. Mom is taking the picture. The year is 1969. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The next posts hint that, though Mom was taking pictures and excited about the land, she still had some "unsettled" feelings about the eventual changes ahead. After that, we'll come back to these days of tractors and "settling" the land.