LETTERS FROM HOME: IN THE LAND OF APPLE TREES AND NO SKINNY DIPPING BEFORE 6 P.M.

April 2, 1998Dear Patty,If asked to compress my life into a sentence or two, the words "I moved around a bit" would seem to go in there somewhere, perhaps sounding like an excuse or boast or evasion. The truth is, I was looking for something.

Northern California offered essential friends like you and Julie and a ride as wild and unpredictable as any earthquake. I went to New Orleans for adventure, muttering something about the need to confront racism first-hand. I found all the racism I could handle.

Given the chance to confront it by joining a group that was squatting in abandoned inner city buildings, I chose bartending and was hired by a man who turned out to be a fan of fascists. There is no escape from certain themes.

The challenge in upstate New York was getting used to a dark 10-month winter and people who seemed to like it. And Southern California was the perfect setting if you have to have a mid-life crisis, fighting grommets in the waves, courting credit card mayhem and danger in women.

Now, those seem like parallel lives that mysteriously intersect in Southeast Missouri. DC and I arrived late at her parents' cabin on the Castor River last weekend. Her mother was washing windows, her brother down from Columbia putting a new counter on the fish-cleaning sink beneath the porch. I imagine he keeps one eye always cocked because he's famous within the family for an encounter with a copperhead in the woodpile. The bite occurred a half hour after he'd chopped off the snake's head.

Her father was in the storage shed making a table that will be used for planing wood. That defines him for me: building something so he can build more things. Hank and Lucy were already there, hanging out like I do. DC brought her brother a package of rubber snakes. For the cabin she had seed packets. When she buys seeds in the spring, she sits me down at the kitchen table and says, "Now, let's go through them." So I read the name aloud and admire the picture on the package and comment on how much sunlight this flower or that vegetable will need. She smiles, and the ritual continues.

The land the cabin sits on is very rocky, and DC's annual attempts to sow beauty into it most often fail. But still she tries. This year she brought both yellow and red sunflower seeds and lots of other kinds with flowery names. On the hill above the cabin near the spot where an outhouse once stood, she planted an apple tree for the deer. Some year in the future, maybe, we'll watch them come to get their apples.

They love this place for the natural refuge it offers and the life and times recorded in the visitors' journal, the chalkboard listing the weight and species of the latest fish caught, the sign that warns "No skinny dipping before 6 p.m." Four generations have heard the thunderstorms advancing down the valley and the hoot owls in the night. Hank and Lucy growl at the hoot owls and at other sounds we imagine but we can't hear. Who knows what they hear.

The river is high now. In the branch nearest the cabin, a fallen birch tree makes a whipping noise as it is jostled by the hurrying water. DC's father says Lewis and Clark called these trees "sawyers."Rootless, caught. Waiting to be carried away. The better feeling is sunk in, committed to here and now. Not waiting but being. An apple tree taking a foothold. Love, SamSam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.