I have a couple of pictures of of the post-moribund, the eternal sleep, the nevermore.

The first got my nature-girl swerve going, when another chick on the beach and I tried to suss out the characteristics and identifying marks of a bird that would be forevermore flightless.

M. guessed penguin, before it got washed into the waves and a Vikings grave. Or someone else who floated the dead.

These pics, though, this gopher in rigor, I took witha deliberate story in mind. The story isn’t mine, it’s my buddy’s. Or her dad’s, rather.

Cliff L. was an honest to fucking god Yankee, capital Y, can’t get there from here (notice I didn’t use cheesy spelling like theyah or thar, but the sound was theyah, just like an ay-up in a Pepperidge Farm commercial). Fortunately, I got a chance to trek to his farm before his aging, never quite healthy body quit fighting.

From another generation, for sure, actually more like two, since my friend was definitely a late in life arrival for her folks, his farm was a bit of a time-warp voyage. He had electricity and running water and all that modern shit, but he put together a lot of the systems himself.

He walked his property confidently, curiously, amused, walking steady on leg braces from childhood polio. I think it was polio, since that would be part of the old-timey feel.

He knew about plants and growing and nature, so he farmed. During the WWII conflict, he welded nuclear subs, or some other kind of huge, specialty of war, needing good welded seams for the boys kind of ship. Somewhere in there in his life, he was also a professional cook.

Instead of who from history would you invite to dinner, I like to imagine people I know meeting other people I know, even though the overlap would be damn unlikely. By now, with Cliff L. gone almost a decade and Pat gone over a nickel’s worth of years, it ain’t gonna happen. Leastways, not on this planet in any kind of conventional, non-mystic way.

I think New England reserve and cantankerousness would have chilled the initial meeting, if Cliff L. and Pat were to meet. But, maybe, something would come up and they would figure out three real areas of concordance. A willingness and patience to explain things to youngsters simply and with real-world metaphor, reading and an unbreakable, unchallengeble (or some real world) belief in knowing about and exercising within the civics of our society.

Vote. Participate. Be responsible.

Liz, his daughter, is one friend who I would never, ever, ever have faced the apathetic argument that is our modern age, “why vote?” Nope, like Pat, she understands, you vote because you can. Because in other places, you can’t.

I’m Pat’s daughter. She’s Cliff’s. We both vote for everything, I think. (I miss not voting for the town tree surgeon in my home town. Especially, when it was the son of my art teacher.)

None of this explains my photos of the dead, though, and why I had to take them on the good, old iPhone and email them to Liz.

Cliff was an amateur naturalist. He walked and wandered the woods and meadows around his town and his own land, flipping rocks while plowing to spot fossils or maybe arrow heads, knowing the genus and species of the flora and flauna around him. One day, he came across an expired, elusive star-nosed mole.

Like Darwin hanging out in an archipelago, he picked it up and brought it home to show his kids and anyone else and to preserve it in his own little museum. OK, it wasn’t a museum, it was his freezer.

I don’t know how many days, month or years had passed since the specimen was collected, but I got to see the star-nosed mole popsicle myself.

Somehow, photos of a dead gopher seem a tad less gruesome to me. And, my specimen was hardly rare, particularly as I found it on the path next to a golf course, where doubtless many other gopher friends and relatives were frolicking.

I knew Liz would get the connection. And, to Cliff L., continue to RIP and know we are carrying on the nature-loving.