LETTERS FROM HOME: THE SOUND OF SOFT THUMPING ON THE WINDOW BY THE RIVER

May 29, 1997

Dear Leslie,

DC and I have returned from a few days at her family's cabin on Castor River. Notice the word "restful" didn't appear in that sentence. Her family's idea of relaxation is to fish a bit between work details.

My brother-in-law Paul spent part of the weekend hunched over a miter box. He was framing the door to the porch. DC's mother mopped floors. Her father and I took the chain saw down to the river early one morning to clear away some fallen trees that were blocking the fishing boat passage.

DC tells me she scrubbed some floors but I didn't see her much. Sweat was sure to be involved.

The cabin was built sturdy in 1908, and the family cares for it now like the beloved heirloom it is.

We eat heartily and eccentrically there on the screen-in porch, human pilgrims huddled together at the long table, a red-checked barge in a sea of wildness. Barbecue and baked potatoes, strawberries and brownies, pancakes and kiwi fruit. Is there a dull taste in the outdoors?

At night after dinner we play Trivial Pursuit. The competition's tough -- genius edition and many of the answers are outdated -- but hints are allowed. A good guess is sometimes punctuated by an owl's hoot.

Hank and Lucy love going to the river. They invariably return rife with ticks and burrs and too exhausted to lift their heads from the hard tile floor.

Lucy climbs acrobatically up the fallen trees and walks across the narrowest of them to the river's far bank. Hank whines until she comes back, then spats with her, I think because he doesn't like being left behind.

Lucy swims like a hairy dolphin. Hank cries because he knows he has to swim too if he wants to follow us as we walk the river. His front paws pump frantically and he makes little headway. Sooner or later he comes to a shallow part he can stand in, but he doesn't always understand the concept.

The night before we arrived, Hank and Lucy began barking at night sounds after everyone went to bed. After numerous attempts to quiet them failed, Paul loaded the dogs in the back of his pickup camper, drove down the road a piece and then abandoned them to bark in solitude in the back of the truck.

We guess their keen hearing picks up movements we can't hear. But the next night they slept soundly on the floor in our bedroom.

That night, a stupendous lime green and white luna moth with the large hind wings attached itself to the cabin's window, looking like a caped diva in waiting. DC heard a soft thumping on the window. She arose and discovered her father had turned off the floor lamp next to the moth's window. When she turned the light back on, the moth calmed down.

Moths are the victims of human sophistication. They roost by day and navigate at night by the moon. Sometimes they confuse an artificial light for their lunar reference point and fly in circles.

There is a tragic theory that moths sometimes attempt to roost on a light because its brightness makes them think it's daytime.

Dogs and moths and I'd say people aren't so different in their confusion and yearnings for contentment.

The majority of my days at the river are spent lazily, actually. I mostly nap and read and walk the banks. To wash civilization off takes awhile. We weren't there long enough for it to happen this time. Commitments drew us back to town, back to flying in circles.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.