We walked out to my grandfather's pickup truck.
"Anything you'd like to do with the day?" Da asked.
"There's work at the lofts," I replied.
Da smiled. "The race hasn't even begun. You can't go hanging around the lofts day and night. Your mother would have my hide. Next thing you know you'll be sleeping in with the birds."
"We could get things ready for when they come home," I said.
"Dickens won't come home any faster if we stand at the door with a welcome mat."
"I mean to wait for Moonbeam and Jenny just as hard," I protested.
"Not likely," Da laughed.
"I favor them all," I insisted.
"But I think you've got a special fondness for Dickens. Isn't that so?"
I grinned. I knew my grandfather was slyly watching me out of the corner of his eye as he started the truck, waiting for my true reply.
"Indeed," I finally said, just as he would have done, after reasonable consideration, giving much and little of my feelings away.
"First thing, we'll get something to eat," Da decided.
We drove along the road that shouldered the Genesee River toward Da's house. The wind blew in through the open windows of the truck, mussing up his white hair. He half closed his eyes against it and darted them from one side of the road to the other.
"Things are changing," he said as though to himself.
"What, Da?" I said.
"Things are much changed from the time when I settled your grandmother in the house along the stream. The girls" meaning my aunts Amelie and Agethe "used to come out to that place right there."
I looked to see an area paved with concrete, fenced in all around with chain link fence, some sort of storage place I supposed.
"Wild flowers of a dozen sorts grew there. It was the end of the trolley line. Seemed to be a hundred miles from home. Gone now."
"I can see."
"Yes, the flowers gone. And the girls gone too," Da said with a rare wistfulness in his voice. "Your Aunt Amy lives way out in California. Mean to go there one day. Yes, I'll do it when I can find the time. Aggie's living down in Louisiana. Should visit with her, too. I'll do it one day."
He was quiet for a while, then the house came in sight. All of a sudden he said, "A body never gets tired of coming home, does he?'
I could feel his love of the little house, the backyard, the rushing stream, the pigeon lofts, the stand of trees, and the two small gardens that he grew, one for herbs and one for table vegetables. It was something I could almost touch.
We reached the house. Da drove the pickup along the double track of concrete that led to the garage. We got out, stood a moment, the sun warm on our faces. The river mist was all burned away since the morning when I'd walked to the house made mysterious by the foggy dark just barely tinged with dawn. Everything was quite ordinary now. I tried to feel the magic of homecoming which Da seemed to feel, but it had been too short a journey for a boy to get much homesick. Is it because a child always expects that home will be there? Does an old man fear it may not be? Of course I loved the house. It was comfortable. Familiar.
The birds had trapped themselves of their own accord. Da didn't believe in letting the birds have the complete freedom of the skies. He'd learned they actually took less exercise, hung about the porches and roofs of the lofts, gossiping instead of taking flight. They were given their freedom with the rising of the sun, when it was high, and when it set. Then the river breezes stirred, ruffling the down on the birds' breasts and rousing them to joy.
We walked down to the pens. The river lay some distance away, a silver path at the end of the long slope of the valley. A stand of willows and cottonwoods had been planted as a break against any chilling winds of too much power. Their whispering created an odd windowed silence when I stood as I did facing the smoothly running water of the stream that fed the Genesee.
My grandfather freed the gates. The birds hurried out, gathered, and then took wing all in a rush. They columned into the air nearly wing to wing. A solid shape of feathers, a single hush of sound. They whipped about leaves caught in the pools and eddies of the sky wind tossed.
I craned my neck to look at them, flashing white, gray opal, and grizzle blue against the vault of day. My heart lifted up. Would I ever tire of the sight? The thought, come all unbidden, somehow saddened me for a moment. I took several steps closer to my grandfather who was looking up with distance seeking eyes such as sailors and plainsmen are said to have. They were so clearly blue as to seem to reflect the very sky itself.
With a rush of love that shook me I was sharply aware that my grandfather was feeling exactly what I felt myself. Surely I would never tire of the sight of birds set free. I took my grandfather's hand.
"We'll let them play as they like while we have something to eat," Da said.
We walked back to the house and let ourselves in through the kitchen door into the small mud room. Da stamped his feet from old habit, small ritual of remembered domesticity. I did the same. We went into the kitchen, sunny and old fashioned. My mother kept the curtains starched and crisp at the windows despite Da's protestations that he could do without such feminine niceties. Her answer was a smile as she went on about her purpose, setting tulips and hyacinths in bright little pots around the place in proper season, braiding a small rug to place in front of the kitchen sink.
"You may pretend to be a crusty old bachelor, she would often tease, "but the fact of a marriage that lasted nearly thirty five years kind of ruins the act, wouldn't you say?"
Da would humph or growl because be felt it expected of him. He'd sit glowering at the kitchen table, playing the role my mother Beth assigned him. When she was gone, the woman's smell of her still lingering in the room, he'd get very quiet, his eyes strangely bright, and I knew he was thinking of Grandma Jenny when first they'd moved into the house with nothing more than a bed, a table, and a few chairs. Did he have her back with him again, young, strong limbed, hair as rich and heavy as shocked wheat, the way he'd so often described her to me? In a kitchen once furnished with nothing much more than the sun pouring through the window did he hold her prisoner in his arms again and kiss her for dear life and good love as I sometimes saw my father do to my mother?
I'd cough or make some other sound to bring Da back to me at such times, jealous of a past in which I'd had no part.
He stood at the window as the breeze swept up from the river and the birds soared overhead. The look was in his eyes; I coughed.
He shook his head and smiled, then went to the icebox and poked around inside, brought out a big tomato and some lettuce, fried some bacon, and toasted four slices of bread cut from a fresh loaf. We built two rough sandwiches together. Da found some schoolboy apples and set them on the table with a bottle of milk and I brought two tumblers from the drain board by the sink.
We sat down to eat, two old fanciers having a bite together. Comfortable. Companionable. Prepared to eat in silence as old comrades will.
Da had taken a first taste of the good, cold milk when he raised his hand to his hair and cried out as though something had smashed through his head.

I think now of how my grandfather stressed the virtue of loving one's home. As a boy I thought it because he'd been forced by circumstance to be a gadling and wanderer, an emigrant to a strange land, a salesman forced to travel in order to earn his living and support his family.
Since then I've come to know that wasn't at all the truth of it. First of all, his life in Havelange wasn't one of harsh deprivation. Nor had he ever said it was, but certain stories tended to present his childhood as one of greater hardship than it had been in reality. I've come to know it as a device by which elders boast of the better life they've managed for their sons and daughters.
Da's father had wanted better things for his eldest son, second oldest child. Henri Baudoum was given more schooling than was common to a member of the craftsman's class. It was often interrupted, and he was twenty before he finished his secondary schooling, but his father was ready to send him on to the University at Liege if Henri could pass the examinations.
My grandfather didn't try because his feet were restless. He wanted to see the world and used the money meant for his tuition to buy passage to America. That was in the year 1882, nearly a hundred years from this day in which I sit upon the ground beside an empty pigeon loft and dwell on another day forty years past.
The tangle of time fascinates and confounds me. How can it be that I've thought so little of that day for this long stretch of years? Is that so? Wouldn't it be closer to the truth were I to say that the day has never left me for a moment? That day and the ones that followed. Perhaps I haven't consciously dwelt on it, but the ghost of it is in my bones and blood.