Standing on the church’s front lawn last Sunday, my husband and I were enjoying the ice cream social and chatting with Phil, when there came a sound in the sky. “Here comes a B-17,” Phil said. “How did you know?” I asked, as the aircraft hove into view. “You couldn’t see it yet.” “By the sound,” Phil answered, and my husband nodded. This is something he can do, too.
My husband, a small boy at the time, lived in Detroit when Willow Run was turning out B-24s at the rate of roughly one per minute. He was interested in planes and the war effort, and learned to identify the sounds of various planes. Phil said, “I was a teenager during World War II and working on a farm. B-24s, five or six of them, would fly over in formation when I was out in the fields. They were built at Willow Run, and had to be tested. They make an unmistakable sound.
“They were part of my youth. I admired them then, and I admire them now.” He learned the sounds of more aircraft in Korea, where he was an observer talking bombers in to targets during the war there. He and my husband talked about how frequently the B-17 flies over Ann Arbor. “It flies out of the Yankee Air Museum at Willow Run,” Phil told me later. “You can book a ride. One day, I may work up the courage and go.” If he does, I wouldn’t be surprised if my husband went with him.
My friend Pat found herself called upon to do something unusual this week. She volunteers for Washtenaw Literacy and was early for an appointment with a tutee at the Whittaker Road branch of the Ypsilanti District Library. While she stood and waited, she admired the small children who’d shown up for some little-guys programming that hadn’t started yet. Then the kiddies lined up and started to file past her.
The little boy in front stopped in front of her and held up his arms to her, clearing indicating his wish to have Pat pick him up. Startled, she said, “I’ll have to talk with your mom first.” Eye contact quickly picked out the mom, who smiled and indicated her permission. So Pat reached down and asked the boy, “Right-side up or upside down?” He opted for upside down, of course, and Pat obliged. The child loved it, and Pat put him back down.
Whereupon, the next child in line stopped in front of Pat and held up her arms. And so it went, on down the line of little ones, each stopping in front of her and holding up his or her arms to her, to be picked up. “Did you go through them all?” I asked. “I only held the first one upside down,” Pat said, but every child asked to be picked up. “And they all nestled right into my neck. It was wonderful.
“I wonder what the children were thinking. Was I part of story time, a library resource?” Whatever the little guys were thinking, they took their hugs in stride. And so did Pat. She’s like that.
The heat has eased off in the last few days, and I’ve been puttering about the garden. Specifically, I’ve been pruning, trying to make the yard look as if people still live at our house. I find pruning pleasant work. We’ve all heard of sculptors or woodcarvers who say that first they look at the marble or wood or whatever their medium, to see what it wants to be, then they remove everything that doesn’t belong there. This is how I feel about trimming bushes.
My tool of choice is garden pruners. Electric hedge clippers would get the job done faster. I understand that. I also believe that, with my tremor, the end result of my using electric hedge clippers would look like topiary gone very, very wrong. And the racket they make would keep me from the peacefulness I feel when trimming.
I was working on the boxwoods in the front garden after dinner yesterday, when a group of neighbors strolled by. The first I knew of it was when Dave called out, “I wanted elephants.” “I’m afraid elephants are beyond my skill level,” I countered. He was having none of it. “You’re not really trying,” he said. “I want elephants.” “They are elephants,” I announced. “They’re just sleeping.” And I curled up in a ball shape that, I’m sure, looked exactly like an elephant in slumber. At which point, Dave and his entourage laughed and walked on by, leaving me to peaceful trimming.
12 August 2022