Letter Before Leaving for a Reforestation Brigade

58 the minnesota review Sesshu Foster Letter Before Leaving for a Reforestation Brigade You may not understand why these duties, why such travels, why they are fighting . . . (/ am not going to fight, my little one, I told you what kind of work it is. You said, "Are they going to teach you how?" "How to plant trees?" "Yes," you said. "Yes, " I answered, August 30, 1984.) To plant trees and, to plant trees. Right now you nap at Abuelito's, the smog blowing through the bougainvillea at our door. . . In Nicaragua, I promise in the rain or in the heat, with my back bent over the earth and my hands in it, I will be talking to you, while little halfmoons of dirt wax underneath my fingernails. Our nights you may feel grow far apart. . .Listen to me, my girl, and listen to your mother. She will have stories for you, and between us in pauses in the work foster 59 a long time from now we will have our little poems. In time you should understand, better than I, I hope, the love such duties are responsible for, for you, for you and yours. I'll leave this in an envelope (the mail's no good where I'm going) for your mother to read to you when I'm gone. One day you may see the breadth of the great land where in a warm winter storm washing out roads, heaving huge hemlocks into the flood, there was this beautiful strong young woman hiking for miles with Jimmy and me through the rising rivers to the shore, where we watched trees float past the fishing village out to sea, the rain beating on us in sheets and the logs booming together in the surf as it grew dark. The time was upon us, you were coming and we didn't know. Her full cheeks flushed under those dark eyes, that beautiful young wife's arms around my neck as we went through the cold brown flood You were born that night after a rough ride driving the little Fiat through streams toward the highway along the Hoh (said to be Quileute meaning Great Milky River) with Jimmy holding her hand. 60 the minnesota review In the lumbertown clinic she was so happy she didn't sleep all night, still holding you in the morning when Jimmy and I awoke in the car, big black ravens scraping the remains of butter forgotten on the hood. That day, like a kid's storybook, the sky cleared and the sun came out on the streaming rainforest. I will not be there when you have to ask this of yourself: what responsibility have I alone, amid the duties called for in the rough, great land? Marina, you were such a child born in a warm storm, with the necessary blood, the necessary cries. Even now I miss you. Even now the Hoh river carries glacial silt milked from the high mountainsides to the sea. ...