Up with the sun and into the delicious heat of a true summer day and a walk into the spring woods and meadow. One picture: a cheerful wild geranium along the meadow trail. At home, I threw open the doors and windows and let the heat in for the start of a first summer weekend. I was very busy, sending an e-mail announcement about my workshop Tuesday night, and then my newsletter too. And I thought I didn’t want to write my newsletter, that i didn’t have an idea. But then, I had one, just like that. Here’s what I shared in my newsletter:

Parachute men say
The first jump
Takes the breath away
Feet in the air disturb
Till you get used to it.

Solid ground
Is not where you left it
As you plunge down
Perhaps head first

As you listen to
Your arteries talking
You learn to sustain hope...

~ Excerpt from "Parachute men say . . ." by Lenrie Peters

Happy Memorial Day Weekend, friends. As I sat down, today, to write my newsletter before taking off for the weekend, I had no idea what I was going to write about. I thought of not writing at all. And then I remembered my father. This wonderful picture of him in the army, in Japan, in 1947. When he was living in memory care, suffering from Alzheimer's, he was very upset, one Memorial Day, when he saw the huge bulletin board of photos celebrating other residents for their military service. In fact, he was suddenly a bit angry. Why was there no photo of him on the wall, he asked. Well, it was an oversight my sister immediately fixed. She found this picture and made sure it was posted where he could see it, and we could all see it, and he was very satisfied, and proud.

My father was, his whole life, terribly afraid of heights. And yet, when he served in occupied Japan, after the war, he volunteered to train as a paratrooper. Why did he face his terror of falling from a great height, time and time again, over the countryside of Japan? The answer is simple, and I have this delightful record, in his letter from Camp Haugen, Japan, to his parents at home in Athol, MA. Jump pay. In his own words, here's why it mattered: 

I'm so glad I decided to write to you today. It was a wonderful prompt for remembering and honoring my father, for his service in the army, and for being such a remarkable role model as a son and brother. And writing this makes me miss him, a little less, and a lot more.

And then, I closed my computer, and went with my daughter to see my friend and dive from her dock into the fresh cold lake under the hot, late afternoon sun, surrounded by the hill of her purple rhododendron in full bloom and Charlie stood at the water’s edge and tried and tried and tried and failed to catch a fish.