In winter we are few, and so we must
Speak words harshly, lest the night swallow them,
But, if you will listen to us, we trust
You will learn to hear and to follow them.

We always and only speak of one thing,
Of everything happening in the world.
And if you listen to us we will bring
Tidings of it all before you, unfurled.

But I tired quickly of hearing it all,
And went back inside to hear something small.

Our criminal system is broken.  Our only way of reacting to any infraction is to treat the person as if they are OBVIOUSLY A DANGEROUS TERRORIST.  Aaron Swartz was, by all accounts, about the opposite of that.  America has, sadly and dangerously, become a jailer state.  Proportionality is gone.

Our mental health is broken.  So many among us face depression, anxiety, and stress without the tools or support we need to cope.  Instead of treating this as a health problem (it’s probably about as common as getting a cold), we marginalize it, we criminalize it, we minimize it, we ignore it.

Our commons is dying.  I cannot know what made Aaron take his final, foolish action.  But we can all see what drove him in his life.  We have slowly strangled our commons by locking away the creative output that we have paid for with our taxes and donations and creation.  Slowly, painfully, we are recreating a commons from scratch, but while we receive with that hand, privatization and effectively infinite take from our other.

Now, we have lost Aaron.  The actions that resulted in his incarceration were somewhere between a juvenile prank and justifiable civil disobedience.  Yet it remains that he spent the past two years hounded by the government that I work for and vote for.  I suppose he is a martyr to these causes, but we needed him more as a prophet.

I and others like me feel his death so keenly in part because we aspire to be the misfit, the wunderkind, the maker that he was.

RIP, Aaron.

I could only help her with one of these things.
And she raised no objection.
On the other side of the river, she spreads her wings,
To fly.

I went around the back of the hen house; as I rounded the corner, a large raptor of some variety (can’t be sure if it was a hawk or an owl) flew away, and there I saw one of the Rhode Island Reds in a heap, missing some critical parts of her anatomy.  She was, sadly, well beyond any help, but happily,s well beyond any suffering.  Still no sign of any of the other missing chickens, and all the bad signs had just gone to worse.

I gathered the eggs and took them inside, and told Lina I was going to go look for the other chickens, or at least some sign of what had happened to them.  ”A chicken emergency,” I said.  I grabbed a shovel, and went back out back to stomp around in the trees, hoping against hope.  Alas, none of them were back in the trees.

As I was walking back to the house, I saw a little clump of white off to the side of the chicken yard, and I was pretty sure that was our one Silkie hen.  She’s a favorite of ours, for a couple reasons- one is, she is a funny looking little bird, with white poofy feathers and blue skin.  Another is, she’s mama to the one chick we hatched this year, who in turn was also missing, along with the chick’s other mama, who is a Buff Orpington.  The chick is a local mongrel of indeterminate breeding.

As I walked over to her, she didn’t move.  I reached down to see if I could figure out what had happened to her, and suddenly she gave a start and SQUAWKed at me something fierce, and ran straight through the fence back into the chicken yard, where the rest the missing birds had made themselves totally invisible among some corn stalks.  They were all within five or six feet of me, and I couldn’t see them.  They didn’t move until it was clear their cover was blown, at which point they hightailed it back to the henhouse.

Startled and relieved, but mostly relieved, I closed up the henhouse to count them, and I discovered the mongrel chick was still missing, which I mostly discovered by noticing how distressed the Buff Orpington and Silkie mamas were acting.  I opened up the chicken door again, and both those hens walked over to the fence and started clucking, at which point their little wayward chick came running back into the chicken yard.

All chickens now accounted for, I gave thanks that one was not more than one, and marveled at the chicken magic that let them hide from me in plain sight.

At two years old, Loyd had a ruptured appendix and spent a month in the hospital, twenty-one miles from the farm.  His mother visited every day in a horse and buggy.  This was 1916, and she forded the Milk River each way.

The Brunton clan was a big, blended family- twelve children in all.  Loyd had five brothers, a sister, and five half-sisters.  Two of his half-sisters died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Loyd took his first five years of grade school at a rural school in Alberta, about a mile’s walk from the farm, summer and winter.  Grandpa didn’t write that this was uphill both ways in the snow, because he was never one to complain about such things, but it was after all in Alberta during the lead-up to the first world war, and I imagine it was that way.

By the time he was eleven years old, he had learned how to shoot a .22, drive a model T, ride riding horses (his words), and scrap with some of the other school kids (also his words, and I imagine said with some pride).  The Model T was his father’s first car and on the day he brought it home all of them were offered our first ride in an automobile.

Grandpa writes that “by 1925 my folks had decided prosperity was something they saw little of and it was decided that our mother and five of us kids would go down to a town in Montana called Big Sandy where my oldest brother had been working.  He soon left and joined the Marines.  In 1926 my other brother and father came down from Canada.”

The time in Big Sandy would be short-lived, and prosperity would continue to elude the Bruntons.  While working in the fields, his brother Clayton, recently arrived from Canada, contracted pneumonia and died.

In 1929 Lily and the kids moved to Spokane where Loyd attended North Central High School.  His sister Anita died tragically the following year.

1931 brought more difficulty for Lily “to keep food on the table.”  Loyd contracted another infection- this time it was mastoiditis.  But, in 1933 Loyd graduated from North Central, and he would remain in and around Spokane for the rest of his life, barring those times when military service took him elsewhere.

He worked as a grocery clerk for for a dollar a day after high school.  He attended business classes for a year, and found work as an office clerk.  Grandpa wrote once that they could not afford college, but he was not inclined to go anyhow.  During these years after high school, during the height of the Great Depression, romance budded.

In 1938, Loyd L Brunton and Maxine Juanita Johnston were married and began their life together.  In grandpa’s words, he “married a wonderful gal in 1938.” The same year, Loyd began as a Supply Clerk in the 116th Observation Squad Washington National Guard.  In 1939, they made a honeymoon trip to San Francisco, where they attended the 1939 World’s Fair.

Loyd’s unit was activated in 1940, and he was released February of 1946. In 1941 he joined the regular Air Force as a Master Sgt., and was promoted to warrant officer in 1942.

The war would take Loyd to Salinas, California, Oklahoma City, and then to the European theater.  In 1944, the 116th Observation Squad was deactivated and Loyd was assigned to the 33rd Photo Reconnaissance.  He arrived in Europe in April 1944.

He was then stationed in the Shalgrove RAF Base, 10 miles South Oxford, where the mission was to take aerial photos of Utah and Omaha beach areas.  They also flew missions to assess damage caused by prior bombing missions.  In August 1944  he operated from an airstrip in Normandy as part of the 9th AF, then moving on to Versailles, Brussels, Venly, Brunswick.

Loyd’s brother Foster was in a Japanese prison from 1941 until the end of the war, followed by weeks in the hospital.  In 1946, Loyd returned to Spokane and the Air Guard.

Loyd and Maxine’s family expanded by one in 1950, when Aunt Miriam was born.  Shortly after, in 1951, his squadron was called to active duty for 18 months and they were sent to England to work jointly with RAF.  This was the first fighter squadron to fly across the Atlantic. Maxine and Miriam arrived about 3 months later and the three of them made a trip to the continent, visiting France, Belgium, and Switzerland.

They returned to Spokane in 1952.  Loyd took a position training enlisted personnel, and the family grew again when Dad was born.  The family bought a home in Spokane, where they lived until 1964, when they sold that home and moved to twelve acres in Milan, which grandpa described as being “south of Elk.”  They joined the United Methodist Church, and Loyd served as a volunteer firefighter with the Milan Fire Department.  He served on the boards of the community association, the Milan Cemetery, and the Milan Township.

Loyd retired from the Washington Air National Guard in 1970 after a total of 34 years military service.  He attained the rank of chief Warrant Officer W4 but elected to retire as a Chief Master Sergeant, AF Reserve.   He was a lifetime member of VFW, member of National Guard Association of WA, Air Guard Boosters Club, and Retired Enlisted Association.

That same year, the first of the grandchildren, Cory was born, and Maxine had open heart surgery.  Maxine lost her sight completely in 1971 and Grandpa writes that the “life of both of us was considerably changed at that time.”  Four more grandchildren would follow- Daniel, David, Douglas, and Mike.  Eventually, there would also be eight great-grandchildren.

Loyd and Maxine continued to travel up and down the West coast to California, Oregon, Alaska, and around Washington.  In 1989 moved to the Fairwood Retirement Village, where grandpa described everyone (staff and neighbors) to be “friendly and helpful.”

Grandpa wrote that in 1990, he lost his “most loved one very suddenly because of a stroke,” and that he missed her “tender love.”  Grandpa continued to live at Fairwood until 2011, when at the age of 97, he moved in with Mom and Dad- that’s Paul and Sheila Brunton to you all, where he died peacefully in his sleep this past Wendesday night.

Grandpa wrote about the years after Grandma died as the worst period of his life, but then wrote a question, and an exhortation, which I offer in closing:

“What will tomorrow bring?  That is a question all of us forever have, but life continues.  Let us go ahead, for better or for worse.”

A humbling reality is that other people are also writing, and I have been paying far too little attention.  Robert Pohl wrote a real book (not a 10,000 word collection of essays like mine), which is crazy fun:

http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Capitol-Hill-History-Behaving/dp/160949587X

Robert and I worked together, which is to say that he and Tim Krepp and I were all home with kids at the same time in the same place.  I have left Capitol Hill, but they are both still there, and both writing.

Abbie Grotke, whom I work with, released an ebook of her classic:

http://www.missabigail.com/book/

I call it a classic because she’s been working with the material since 1998, which is almost forever in electronic publishing.

A dozen family members are writing, and doing so with more persistence and success than I have thus far.  Books, theses, blogs, songs, movie scripts, and comic books are springing into being.

The writer I admire most is my sister-in-law, whose horror novel Audrey’s Door is both incredibly well written and incredibly good horror.  I revisit the story in my mind whenever I see ants, which is basically every day on the farm.  *shiver*

Uncle Dave is writing songs and music and prose on the road.  I saw an advance copy of JT’s comic, and holy shit.  Oliver is blogging, and he is a serious smarty.  I would be remiss if I failed to mention that my lovely and talented editor not only edits for me, but also blogs a bit.

I am working on another collection of essays, a bit different from the first.  If all goes well, they will be ready by summer.  This time around I think I may skip the Amazon three month exclusive to get everything out to the Nook, iPad, and other readers more quickly.

Thank you to those who are writing, those who are publishing, those who are reading.  It is a wonderful little ecology, even on the fringes where I am sitting now.

Get yours here: http://www.amazon.com/In-Transit-Essays-Brunton-ebook/dp/B007NNR956/.

If you’ve already read the collection, take this chance to send it to a friend.  If the friend doesn’t have a Kindle, have them try the Kindle Cloud Reader at http://read.amazon.com.  If the friend would rather wait and pay more money, print, epub, and audio versions of the collection are on the way this summer.

The first week of sales for In Transit went really well. After quietly uploading it last week, and after a lot of support from family and friends this week, the collection has been consistently in the top ten for Amazon’s nature writing category. It is a small category, but the other authors in the list are people I admire.

Embarrassingly, it was also a week of identifying and correcting a half-dozen typos in the collection. Thank you to everyone who pointed them out. People who emailed about the typos all acted a bit sheepish. I am the only one who should be sheepish.

But I’m not, at least not too much. I have a background in software, where we fix bugs all the time. This is one of the beauties of publishing electronically: it can be fixed. Plus, I have now identified a few people who will be copy editors on the next project before it hits the store. You all know who you are, and now I do, too.

I leave you with the one of the many trains that inspired the Trains essay in the collection: Fast Train, Cold Morning.