(All images by The Drifter)

When he was five years old, his mother got down on his level, as she often did. But this time, she told him something different, something he’d never heard before.

She told him he was going to spend the summer with his Grandmother.

And that she herself, his mother, would come to visit him a lot, with his father; but they also wouldn’t be seeing him for a while.

And she immediately informed him, before he panicked, that this was a good thing – NOT a bad thing, and certainly not a punishment of any kind.

She reassured him about how much both she and his father loved him (and he already knew that very well, since they had showered him with love and attention since day one).

Then she told him that he was going to stay with his grandmother for the summer because his grandmother had things to teach him that only she, his grandmother, could teach him.

He couldn’t wait to get going.

…

He wasn’t scared or nervous at all as his mother drove him north from their very modest Detroit suburb to the thumb area of Michigan, where his grandmother lived in a trailer park on the edge of a small town.

It was a town that was made up mostly of German American and French American people who almost all claimed Indian blood of some kind, usually Chippewa or Iroquois. All the small merchants of the town were former farmers who served all the many farmers who lived spread way out all around the town. It was, and is, some of the most fertile land not just in the USA, but in the world. The town was (and is) fifteen miles away from Lake Huron, one of the Great Lakes.

His grandmother was what can only be called a kind of German mystic, although no one called her that.

But they all came to her when they needed something.

Not when they needed money, because she didn’t have any of that.

But when they needed consolation, needed healing, needed advice, needed a friend, needed someone to listen to them without passing judgement, they came to her.

His mother dropped him off in front of his grandmother’s trailer with his little suitcase. She didn’t make sure he was safely inside or anything. She just picked him up, hugged him, kissed him, said goodbye, then gently put him down and shoved him toward the door of the trailer, where his grandmother was waiting inside.

And then she drove away.

…

At first he and his grandmother didn’t do anything special.

And he almost never got bored, because whenever he started getting too bored, he retreated, and entered a world that no one else around him could see. They thought he was in a trance, but he knew he was somewhere special.

It was a world of the imagination, filled with wild characters, wonderful animals, amazing adventures, the ability to literally fly wherever and whenever he wanted, and also to turn invisible and roam around, wherever and whenever he wanted to.

And they watched a lot of TV.

And she sometimes told him stories about the family, in her quiet voice, what it was like on the ship coming over from Germany, accidents or good things that had happened to people on the farm, wild and crazy things the farm animals had done, stories about weather and storms and harvests, stories about sickness and healing.

And sometimes she read to him, especially about Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh, and even more often than that, from the Bible, stories about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark and the animals and the rainbow, Moses, David and Goliath, Joseph and the coat of many colors, Job and the Whirlwind, Jeremiah and the well, Jonah and the whale, Jesus and his mother, Mary, and the adventures of Paul while he was spreading the Gospel, like Johnny Appleseed in America, who she also told him all about, many times. There was only one picture on the walls of the trailer, and it was a picture of Jesus’ face. He wasn’t being crucified in the picture. In the picture, he was quietly smiling upward with mysterious eyes and a weird kind of halo light falling down behind his head onto his shoulders out of the clear blue sky.

And then one day they started planting things.

Some of the things were flowers, and other things were other, small, green plants.

And she showed him how to plant, how to dig in the soil, how to treat the plants tenderly, how to place them where they now belonged, how to put the dirt back on top, how to pack it all down snugly, but not too snugly, how to water the earth.

And they planted things all in and around the trailer park on the edge of the town.

Then one day when he was sitting on the couch looking at a Bible picture book with all the grown men with their long hair and beards, and the beautiful women in their flowing robes with their flowing, long, beautiful hair, he smelled something wonderful. It was a loaf of bread she was baking.

A little later she showed him the loaf of bread under a kitchen towel. His mouth watered and it looked wonderful.

She told him they needed to go take the bread to a man she wanted him to meet.

…

She drove slowly, cautiously, patiently, calmly, and fearlessly.

She had strong, gnarled hands, a simple bracelet on one wrist, and her long, graying, pretty hair was pulled back with a simple blue ribbon around it.

They drove for a long time.

They didn’t talk, and they were completely comfortable around one another not talking.

They both enjoyed just going, the wheels flying over the road, the farm fields all around them always with trees in the distance.

The man they were going to meet was called Old Joe.

That wasn’t his name, but it was what they called him.

Old Joe was a local legend.

He was such a local legend that stories about him had appeared in the local newspaper a few times, and even on the local TV news station one time.

He lived way out in the middle of nowhere, alone, in a shack, in the middle of a huge, vast field with trees and a river in the distance, and a few huge trees that loomed over and sheltered his shack with their leaf-filled arms.

Except he didn’t live alone.

As the boy’s grandmother pulled the car over to the side of the road by the field where the shack was way over there, she pointed, and he saw that there was a whole, huge pack of gigantic dogs lounging around on the ground around the shack.

She told him that there were at least twelve dogs.

And then he saw the goats.

The little goats were all leaping and jumping and playing and shivering with joy in the tall grass of the field. They were bumping into each other and munching and chomping on grass and little scrub trees in the field. A goat shot away from the rest of them and one of the dogs leapt up and shot after the goat and circled around it, bringing it back, and they looked like they were playing a game on the way back.

His grandmother and himself got out of the car, and started walking across the field toward the shack and the dogs and the goats on a little trail. They held hands as they went and his grandmother held the loaf of bread under her other arm, wrapped in the towel.

The dogs all came over in a pack wagging their huge tails and greeting them. The goats kept to themselves but seemed to start jumping around even more, almost like they were excited by the visitors.

But Old Joe was nowhere around.

They sat down in a couple of old, broken-down chairs that were sitting outside the shack and they waited for him in the warm sunlight as they petted the shaggy dogs and talked to the shaggy, friendly, wagging-tail dogs, and laughed and waved at the goats, some of whom started approaching them and looking at them with curious eyes before bounding away again.

And before very long they saw a man approaching them across the field from the direction of the river.

He walked slowly and steadily and when he was about half way toward where they were he raised his hand and waved at them one simple time.

When the man got to where they were, the boy was shocked, and almost terrified for a few seconds, but then just fascinated.

Old Joe wore a beat-up old black hat that came down very low almost covering his eyes. His eyes beneath the brim of the hat were the darkest, most intense eyes the boy had ever seen. The man’s nose was large and he had a gigantic mustache covering his mouth and a huge, dark, graying, tangled beard that came down to the middle of his chest. He wore a suit of old, black, tattered clothes that was dusty and filled with patches. He had old, battered boots on his feet.

And he never said a word, not even hello.

He just came over to the boy’s grandmother who handed him the loaf of bread. As Old Joe went over to take the bread into the shack, a bird swooped down out of one of the trees over the shack and landed on his shoulder. It rode his shoulder into the shack, and when Old Joe came back out of the shack, the bird flew back up into the tree again and landed in the leafy green branches.

Old Joe pulled over another old, broken-down chair from over behind the shack, and then he sat down right next to the boy. Old Joe leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and just sat there, very close to the boy, while his grandmother continued to pet the dogs and talk to them. Old Joe never said a word. Not one word.

Pretty soon the boy’s grandmother and Old Joe just looked at each other. They both had tiny, small smiles in and around their eyes. No one ever said a word.

Then the boy’s grandmother said it was time to get going. Old Joe just sat there, elbows on knees. The dogs surrounded him, like they were protecting him.

The boy and his grandmother held hands again as they walked back to the car on the little trail through the beautiful, glowing green field that was now popping with harmless grasshoppers hopping all around them.

As they drove away, she told him that Old Joe was her brother; his great-uncle.

…

There was one more thing from that summer that the boy would never forget.

He didn’t remember his grandfather, who’d died right before (right before) he was born.

She told him that his grandfather visited her almost every night (but not every night), just for a few moments.

She would know when he was about to appear because she could suddenly feel it; and then he would sit gently on the other side of her bed, the bed they had shared together, only for a few, dreamlike moments that only seemed half-real.

And he came to tell her that, though it was hard to believe, everything was (even when it wasn’t) okay: now, yesterday, tomorrow, forever, and always.

There were no fences anywhere.

The Drifter