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2009-11-27 - 2:38 p.m.

My dad, as we were leaving my parents' house last night, slipped us a package of bear meat. "Just roll it in egg and flour and fry it up. That'll eat good," he said, smiling. And that's good, but one night up in the hills isn't nearly enough. Not enough time to walk the dogs back behind the house, up the lower stretches of Dan's Mountain, looking for scratched-out patches which means that something big and hairy and warm had slept there a night. Not enough time to talk with Mom, laying about on her big couches in the basement, flipping through the channels, her pausing for something she'd never watch alone but would spend hours on with no problem if she thought I'd like it. Not enough sitting and eating, drinking a beer or two, talking about my brothers and little ones and Obama and nutjob Christians and their jobs or even mine.

They got a new deck, a nice one, with a screened-in part. Thursday morning, I got up early--very early for me--but of course Mom was already awake, on her second cup of coffee, her small body encased in the kind of big, warm sleeping robe she's always worn in mornings off into forever. "Good morning, sweetie," she said. "How do you feel?" I was in the middle of a half-cold, and she'd remembered, and that's how she's always been. She tried to feel my head, but I wasn't feeling that bad and I was a little embarrassed, and so I shooed her hand away and immediately felt guilty for not letting her do the thing she's always done, which is to be completely and totally generous in any way she can. So I told her I was feeling better, which was mostly true. "There's coffee," she said. I found a mug and saw they'd gotten a new machine, the kind where you press your mug against a button, which allows the coffee to shoot out, in a brown stream. I filled the cup, added some milk and a little sugar, and followed Mom to the sliding-glass door, where she was admiring the deck.

It didn't take long for us to open the door, to feel the cold of that new lumber against our feet. I sat in a chair and sipped my coffee. Just then, the sun, low in the southeast, poked through some clouds. "Ah, so you do get some sun back here," I said. "Can't wait until it gets warm," she said. "This is such a nice deck," I said. "I love it already," she said.

As we sat there, sipping coffee, watching our breaths shoot out in brief white bursts, I knew she really did love it. She loves it because she's got pictures in her head of how things ought to be or could be and every once in a while those pictures get made real. And I knew, just then, that though that gown she was curled up in looked bigger, and would keep on looking bigger, that she'd always try to feel my forehead, that she couldn't help it, and that it would always be that way with the forehead and in a lot of other ways. And I knew, out there on the cold, mostly quiet deck, that was the reason I'd keep coming back.

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