We began February under a Wolf Moon: a large full moon named by Native Americans. It is believed that they named different full moons to differentiate seasons, and that when the large Wolf Moon was up it would be at the coldest time of year. Wolves would howl in response to the lack of food and both the animals and the tribe would have to adapt for survival.
The temperatures during this moon were in single digits as January departed.
When checking out at the feed store with lumpy bags of chicken feed I notice small black pots with spike-haired crocuses near the counter. I can’t resist tucking one into a paper bag to take home. This is the time of year when I begin to feel the need for green. On our window sills sit large glass jars filled with ceramic beads and onion shaped Paper-White Narcissus bulbs, their roots, like thin threads, winding deep into the jar to find their water source.
The large garden supply stores are already stocked with seeds, hoes and grow lights. I love to walk in, smell the earth, the moss and dream. However, feeling the need for some color should not be confused with a desire to rush through hibernation. This week has been unseasonably warm causing an early bump into mud season. The newly exposed ground can be deceptive, covered with a veil of clear ice so we walk slowly, with deliberation, like Big Foot, in our messy Mucks, waiting for the return of frozen ground.
Josh has been communicating with a nephew of my father. The two began corresponding when Josh was doing the genealogy work about my dad’s family. A prevailing name listed on the branches of our family tree is “Ira”, my fourth great grandfather’s name, my grandfather’s name and my father’s brother’s name. This man is that brother’s son, Ira III.
He wants to meet us. On the phone he talks about my father playing with him when he was a kid. He mentions meeting me when I was a baby. Curiosity peaked, we decide to take a genealogical road trip.
Our first stop is Bellows Falls, where my father and mother grew up and met. It is an old railroad town with tracks laid directly under my maternal grandfather’s former office. In the day, my mother lived in Bellows Falls, Vermont while my father lived across the tracks, in Walpole, NH. There was one high school in Bellows Falls and my dad made the daily trip, crossing over the Connecticut River on a steel arched bridge, to that high school. This inevitably led to the long running joke that my father was, literally, from “the other side of the tracks.”
Josh and I follow the map in my mind and manage to find my father’s old apartment which remains two stories with a view of the Connecticut River. A cold water flat meant that bathing was done on Saturday nights after heating buckets of water on the wood stove. My dad talked about having just two pairs of pants that were rotated and kept spotlessly clean by my grandmother.
We sit quietly in the car and can hear the thump of the basketball my father constantly kept in hand and the “thwack” it would have made against old wood garage that is, like my dad, long gone. We talk about a lanky young man with neatly combed hair carrying books he never read back and forth across the bridge. On one side, his present, the other, his future.
We find a cafe, order panini turkey sandwiches and sit in the window. My youngest son and I looking down the street where my father walked my mother home from school, where my paternal grandfather and grandmother hurried to work at the chicken plant, that my maternal grandfather overlooked while sitting in his real estate office.
After lunch we climb back into Josh’s truck and head for Alstead, a town not far from Bellows Falls where Ira lives.
In his driveway we see a small wood sign that reads, “Ira Day.” I’m struck in a way I didn’t expect, this family name that is repeated so often in our history and written in scribbled handwriting under so many photos.
The door opens and he is there. I immediately scan his face for my father’s. Even in black and white photos our family resemblance is powerful. Deep set blue/green eyes smile back at the camera from my father’s high school football photo, with him wearing number five, his brother’s army photo and their father’s unsmiling photo of his marriage to my grandmother, Beulah. The Vermont history museum has a wooden portrait of Major Ira and those eyes look out from the painting along with the Romanesque nose that we know as my dad’s. I don’t see any of this in Ira III. His face is round and his eyes are dark behind his glasses. He is without the pile of dark hair. He smiles and shakes our hands, inviting us into his small home.
He offers coffee which Josh accepts. He’s bought a berry pie but we pass, too full of panini. Josh and I sit, side by side, on the blue couch and Ira takes out a wooden stool so as to face us. I look around the room, searching for familiar. Photos of his father, my uncle, in his army uniform look back at me as if trying to decide why we are there. My Aunt Genevieve with her thick, round glasses, wiry curled hair and neat white blouse is there also. Although I saw her only infrequently, I immediately recognize her face. I tell him that I remember her ice-box chocolate cake, that when I would go there with my dad, I’d hope that she’d made one. I laugh at the reason for the memory. He nods but doesn’t take it further. We pick up my Uncle’s army photo and talk about his three years of fighting in Italy in WWII. Leaving home barely out of his teens, “meeting” Jenny through letters, proposing without having met her and marrying immediately upon his return. I remember Ira II as quiet, gruff and rather ill tempered. Apparently he does as well. He talks about his father being a difficult man, talks about punishments to he and his brother, but can’t seem to go beyond this.
When he pulls out a stack of photo albums of his hunting trips he becomes animated. He and Josh talk. He tells us that he adored my father, that he remembers fishing with him as a kid but that when my father married my mother he disappeared. His sorrow is visible as he sips coffee.
We need to get going. We wander around as we head for the door: I point to several antique clocks and he spends time telling me details of their history. This history is important to him.
We pull out of the driveway, I watch the Ira Day sign until I can’t see it anymore, Josh and I both silent. Finally Josh breaks it, “Did you think he looked anything like Bumpa?” “Not one bit,” I respond. We both laugh.
Ira III has a son, Ira IV but he doesn’t have children and probably won’t. Ira III tells us that the name will, like the Major, my grandfather, his son and his son, end here. I watch his face, expecting sadness, not seeing it. He is telling us a fact.
Josh and I agree that we came for something that we did not find but that we are glad that we came.
On the way home we stop at the Country Store in Rockingham: he has never been. We poke around and buy a bag of mustard pretzels and cokes for the ride back.
The sun is low in the sky as we ride. We talk, laugh and eat salty pretzels. It strikes me that this day with my youngest son, searching for deep roots, like thin threads, is now part of our history.