November
He was up late and breakfasted on eggs and bacon prepared by Evy.
The light drizzle suited him that day, although he would pay for this cozy moodiness with aching muscles and a stiff back.
The patter of rain on the roof mimicked the deep breathing of sleep, and the hiss of winds through the cypress was soothing.
Jim told them of the species near water’s edge, the poplar, water maple, and further inland, sweet gum, cypress and hickory. And of course, he could see the long gray mosses hanging from the cypress.
One hundred yards below the house a heart-shaped pool lay clogged with leaves and debris from the off season. Beyond that, a leaf-covered trimaran lay at anchor in the small inlet culled by dragline.
They said Lake Noonan wasn’t deep, maybe fourteen feet at most. The gators stay clear of deep water, preferring the shallows along the shore inlets and swamps.
The trimaran boom swayed in the breeze, a skein of moss hanging from its tip.
For all his aches that Saturday, it was peaceful there by the side of Lake Noonan. He could recall the heated nonsense, that clamor from the den after Thanksgiving dinner in which Jim’s daughter Jenny harangued his girlfriend who voiciferously defended science against the Leftist elements in the living room.
Joe, Jenny’s boyfriend, was a house painter in his thirties, maybe 36, had grown up in New Jersey, lived in Minnesota and Colorado and had spend quite a few years in nearby Gainesville, Florida.
Jenny was then an undergraduate in political science at the University where Jim, her father, taught, with all the Leftist leanings and suppositions of her brilliant father. Francie, the wife of an unsuccessful candidate for state representative, was also there for Thanksgiving, spurring on the political debate while delaying her Thanksgiving trip to her uneducated kin in nearby Ocala and Lakeside Florida.
Then Ev, his girlfriend’s mother and a professor of nursing, would occasionally join in the verbal fray.
As for him, when the debate had passed from explanations of the status of his cystic fibrosis screening research and the degrees of difficulty in counseling and testing Huntington Disease families, Jenny insisted his girl take a political position on Nicaragua, the nuclear arms race, and genetic engineering of potato pests.
She meanwhile insisted upon the necessity of animals in medical research.
As the two discussants became more aroused in their claims and counter-claims, denials and accusations, to him, the evening had slipped from a reasonable exchange to a carnival of debate.
Muttering, he left through the glass door to sit outside on the deck chair with his feet on the redwood plank table.
Behind him, Polly the ancient boxer dog, sniffled in sleep and snored as he, nearby, sank into the corduroy padding of the deck chair.
The sounds of light rain in the trees and the buzz of insects was, to him, far more enlightening than the furor within, near the lights.
For a moment, he turned his head around, no longer able to make out the words, the theses and antitheses, the arguments and counterclaims.
In fact, it was pleasant to hear the sounds of peaceful freedom in the woods, while the partisans sat in a perfectly arranged rectangle near the lights in their glass box.
***
He must have dozed off for a moment, or was perhaps mesmerized by the pleasing night air, when he saw his work in his mind’s eye, before him, and upwards against the cypresses.
The gene transfer protocols and field inversion electrophoresis system for narrowing down the chromosome 7 regions containing the cystic fibrosis gene. With both a weariness of body and a singular clarity of mind, the challenges facing his career advancement, stood in sharp relief against the night…