THE FIFTY-NINTH PAGE

At the house, he was as comfortable with the books as he had been with Mother Nature. Not bothering to put down his pack, he strolled from shelf to shelf commenting on the authors. He no doubt was older than he appeared to be because no one could pack into a couple of decades an apparent forty years of reading.

He paid particular attention to my modest collection of books about gardening, which leaned more toward history and theory than practice. At the time, I had not entered the gardening period of the civilized man, and I considered most gardening books as “how-tos.”

In the mysterious South, he had been a gardening designer for several years, so he knew what he was talking about. Another skill in cooking made him a far more desirable companion than the unlamented wife.

Yes, he stayed on past the first evening of our encounter. And yes, he stayed in my room and bed when he was not made too restless by his illness. Some of our best moments were found reading aloud to each other that summer. We read novels to each other at first, but as his weariness increased and his attention wandered, we moved to short stories and poetry. By the time we were reading only poetry I was doing all the reading because he was blind.

Blindness was his death.