Life Sketches by Terry Berkson
The Planting of Memories
Recently, a friend brought some spruce saplings to the farm for planting. Luckily, my son was up for the weekend to lend a hand with the digging. We placed some near the house and then headed for the woods, which are thin on evergreens. No sooner did I open a hole for the first seedling than I was back to the spring of 1966, in the forest near Rothenberg, Germany, where it looks a lot like the countryside around Richfield Springs.
We were medics attached to the Seventh Army and out on maneuvers. I pitched my pup tent with a guy named Hailey from Niagara Falls. He had already been in Germany for a year and could speak a bit of the language. It was sunny and warm and, after testing our unit’s drinking water, I sat in front of our tent reading Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” Santiago was sitting in his boat with his palms raw and bleeding from the big fish that had raced the line through them at a cutting speed. He was thinking about the great Joe DiMaggio and how he continued to play ball in spite of a painful spur on his heel. Then a cuckoo bird let out a call and I was back in the woods. I had thought the ridiculous sound only came from clocks made in the Black Forest, but here was a live bird in a nearby tree “cuckoo”-ing away.
