What I meant to say yesterday was...

...although the rythmic tap tap tapping of the hammer joins the whine of the power drill in a concert of sound not unlike the forest at dusk - can you hear it, a woodpecker and a coyote join forces as the sun slips beyond the horizon? - this perfect blend of sounds fails to sooth the Small Boy into a blissful slumber. Perhaps it is because he is, like his mother and her father before her, a child of rivers, and the sounds of the forest are too intense. Perhaps his spirit longs for the ripple of water across rocks and through grass-laden banks, the early morning stillness disturbed only by the whistle of fly-line whipping through the air as he lets off the perfect cast, the cast against which he will measure all other casts the rest of his life, the cast that sends his Royal Coachman flying, hovering, then floating downstream until it is lost in the mist. No, he does not like these forest sounds. Like a cygnet - like his mother - he longs for open valleys cut through by trout streams. It is in his blood.

Or perhaps I am projecting. My father - my son's grandfather - was a fisherman. The rivers he fished echo through the summers of my childhood like a fugue. I am homesick for the summers of my childhood today.

I am missing my father today.

I am missing the places that brought my father to life. The places where a piece of my heart lies buried, waiting for spring.

I am very far from home tonight.