My father came home from the war
but we still didn’t have any money
so we moved out of town
into my dead grandpa’s cottage on the river.
Set among the great oaks
the only house on the whole River Road.
No electricity, no telephone
no running water, no indoor toilet.
In the winter it took the county
three days to come and plow.
Our own private school holidays.
We pioneers of the Great White North
like Daniel Boone or Paul Bunyan himself.
My job every evening
was to light the candles
and the two kerosene lanterns
on the living room mantle.
Our water came from the pump out front.
I carried the buckets to my mother
to fill the dog’s bowl, to brush our teeth.
Before bedtime I walked my little brother to the outhouse
keeping an eye out for creatures of the night.
We took our baths in the river
even my mother and father
though I learned many years later
that our river was dirty.
My happiest times in those years on River Road
were walking with my dad to the city dump
a half mile up the road
pulling my red wagon behind us
to carry home the treasures we found.
I searched for bottle caps
to add to my collection
while my dad looked for household furnishings.
A bedside table with a broken leg
a discarded flower vase
an ashtray from somebody’s Florida vacation
rusty old tools.
We lacked this and that but
we loved our life on the river.
The swimming, our green rowboat
with its one horsepower motor,
birches and pines, expeditions to Pig Island.
After two years the Meads and the Orths built houses nearby
and the county installed electric lines on River Road.
Our world would never be quite the same.
