The View from Black Mountain          “We all need people in our lives we can’t repay.”                                       —  DR. MARTHA B. STRAUS   Is that the conversation as we climb the hill in silence — what we can and can’t repay? No wonder words aren’t there this time, this winter without snow. I’m not a man to say much when I don’t know what I mean. On top we do the stations: To the east, Monadnock in a powder-blue mist, scenes from the past, wreckage, recovery — at least it’s always there. To the south, leafless hills and a bend in the Connecticut like a slip showing, and that goddamn nuke (will they never shut it down?), and, hidden, my keepsake town, Brattleboro. To the west, I tell myself I see Wyoming, San Francisco, Cambodia. After a rest we head back northward, no view, hand in hand.                                                                  for Marti     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont January 2012