Yesterday afternoon, we drove to Bruno for Gene Lourey's visitation. The trip seemed to take forever between the combines and construction on the back roads we take to link up to the freeway system.
We arrived in the last hour, but we could have been another hour or more late, for the line of people coming to say goodbye and to comfort the large and remarkable Lourey family snaked out of the gym of the old school that has been converted to one of the Nemadji Research Corporation's three locations. Familiar faces from political circles were there, but mostly those in line had never been on Almanac.
People in line shared the connections that brought them there: work, school, community building. A quip about dodging combines brought a response from a fiercely blue-eyed man that he'd been off the road by three. We struck up a conversation: he turned out to be a forest fire fighter as well as a farmer, who would be our intrepreter for the woodsmen's tools laid out on a table among the cuttings from Gene's beloved trails.
Visitors were welcome to take a cutting, and we choose a sprig spangled with bright red berries. Mike the forestry guy said it was winterberry, what some call American holly. It's beautiful.
We gave our respects to Becky, who worried about her children's grieving, a mom even in the hardest times.
It was dark when we stepped out into mid-October in Northern Minnesota for the long drive home. The gods of ipod froze, and so we drove in silence, thinking about people who build communities, who blaze trails for the delight of their family and friends, who step into fire.
The winterberry now hangs in our writing studio, a bright reminder of a good man who blazed trails.
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