Catching up on the classics.

   It was a was a sweet walk with Trygve, my five year old Springer, who's now in his prime.  Perhaps that was the real reason I was out.  It's a shame that the bird population is in the depths when he's so ready.  Kjell, age 12, has retired with back problems so it's all up to Trygve now.
   First we hunted Mary's ditch and it wasn't cold for December, about 30 degrees.  The tire tracks from my truck came in handy...just after the field was tilled I drove the edges of cover,  The wind, 15-20 mph out of the NW  was raw.  Trygve did the hard work in the heavy cover as I walked the edge.  There is little snow cover left and we didn't see a bird...that is until we got back to the road and were walking the quarter mile back to the truck.
  Off to the west in Hellickson's field the birds began to fly.  An entire flock including many hens.  It was strangely comforting to see all those birds.  Though it was land I could not hunt I was pleased to see that there were a number of birds.
   Next we walked Happy Home in the tall Switch Grass and the standing corn planted as a wildlife winter food plot.  Here we flushed many hens, off limits for hunting, but encouraging for the future.  By now the cold wind had worn me down and Trygve had had a good run.
   Repairing to the Little House on the Prairie I looked on the bookshelf for a small book to read.  I'm expecting  delivery of a long biography of Andrew Jackson so wanted one I could finish  quickly. What did I find but Thornton Wilder's THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY?   Wilder received one of three Pulitzer prizes for the book copyrighted in 1927.  Because I'd never read it I dove into it.
  What a delight.   Five people die when the old Inca Bridge of San Luis Rey, Peru, collapses in 1714. The book, a novel, tells the story of those five.  The elderly Abbess of the Convent in San Luis Rey, who did not die on the bridge says when she learns some of the story of one who did die "Now learn," she commanded herself , "learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace."  Well said Abbess!
   The books ends with this reflection by the Abbess on those who died and those who remember them.
     "'Even now,' she thought, 'almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself.  Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman her mother.  But soon we shall die and all memory of these five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten.  But the love will will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love.  There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.'"

Al & Trygve on the prairie.

The Little House On the Prairie.