A light wooden box,

Notched with darkness.

Each corner has 4 stripes.

Walnut nested in pine.

Uncovered, showing off

Their oil-spill wavy grain.

A tree’s worth of history -

Flattened and smoothed.

A round little knob,

To lift the top

On its golden, nested hinges.

A box.

A craft.

A display of care.

It started with the wood pile,

The careful selection,

The drawn out design,

The effortless first cuts,

The forming of nature

Into 45 then 90 degrees.

Calloused fingers holding the sandpaper,

Asking something hard to be soft,

Something raw to be finished.

My first word: da da,

My second word: a call for my brother,

(Or maybe I was just calling for ball,

But I doubt it,

It’s my brother that brings the fun-

A hacky sack, a Koosh ball, a challenge.)

He’s competitive, despite winning everything anyways.

Infuriatingly calm on the rare occasion he loses.

He’s funny - jokes probably at your expense.

He’s lost in thought again,

Thinking about how he’s always right,

Wondering if there’s anything he doesn’t know,

Looking around to see if he can find anyone smarter than him.

He can’t.

He has an engineering degree,

Types 100+ words a minute.

Avalanche training complete,

He snowboards the black diamonds,

Wishing someone else could keep up.

Maybe he doesn’t know it all,

Just enough to pilot the way,

To set the bar too high for me to climb over.

He is a quiet leader,

Guided by a strong sense of right and wrong,

(Mostly described as stupid or not.)

On his bachelor trip,

All his friends agree,

“He is one of the best men I know,

We are lucky we met him,

Lucky to hold on to a friendship with someone so special.”

Lucky to lose each board game,

Each competition of tossing sticks at other sticks,

Glad to be schooled at pool, or darts, or any other trajectory,

Just grateful to be part of the journey.

I watch him do a wheelie on his mountain bike,

And can’t tell if he’s forty like the calendar would dictate,

Or if he’s still a 10-year-old boy,

Testing to see if his friends can keep up.

They can’t.

And neither can I.

Not now, as adults, 

Not when I was a teen,

And his beer-bloated-college body

Could still weave seamlessly around me on the soccer field.

He says his knees hurt,

But no one else can tell.

Mind made of metal.

When I visit his house,

There are endless projects-

Woodworking in the garage,

Coding on the laptop.

He taught me engineering isn’t so much a career,

But an insistence to know how everything works,

To turn ideas into steps into something wonderful you can hold,

Show your admiring friends and leave them wondering how.

Master of taking schemes from conception to completion.

Priorities spelled out on the Trello board.

I think of my own projects piling up dust.

Does his energy know no bounds?

Your love is a crest,

Golden and blessed,

A mountain removing its veil.

Persistence and chance,

Were leading the dance,

Joyfully merging your trails.

At the edge of forever,

Waits your next adventure,

The white landscape, a glorious gasp.

Gravity calls,

Lean into the fall,

Embracing each other’s warm grasp.

Extensions of you,

In this boundless view,

Though blurry with flurries it hides.

Your open hearts see,

Vivid futures will be,

Twisting, harmonious lines.

Carve your own path,

The impact will last,

Those following using your guide.

Crescendoed descent,

Excitement well spent,

Your heartbeats, now unified.

The silence of stone

And deep crunch of snow–

All notes in your tune of devotion.

Choreographed grace,

Setting the pace,

While lilies bloom with emotion.

A promise is kept,

Under each sunset slept,

Your melody, timeless and true.

Each day a new chance,

To love with each glance,

Endlessly vowing, “I do”.

The familiar familial shuffling of cards,

Organized chaos manipulated by his wise hands.

A soft competitiveness flies off the cards.

I imagine myself to be a worthy competitor,

Remembering the last hand we played, 

I won 7-4.

Forgetting the years,

Of whispers carrying strategies,

During rounds labelled “just for fun.”

He taught me when to play the aces,

An admiration for the ten of diamonds,

The evasiveness of spades.

Pine, must, spaghetti sauce

Sneak their way into my nostrils,

Scents of the hand-built cabin, 

As I gaze out the framed glass wall.

The sky -

Threatening a dramatic show,

Of lightning on the backdrop of a giant mirror of water.

At the cabin, the sky demands attention

Unlike Grandpa,

Humbly surrounded by legacy.

His peaceful presence almost blends

Perfectly with the serene background.

Until you hear his chuckle,

And a younger, fiery man,

Appears as the twinkle in his eye.

I remember the years,

Of gently spoken knowledge.

Stolen conversations during accidental quiet.

Analysis of short stories,

Admonitions of political events,

The pervasiveness of love.