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Dear Jack, ole sock, were thinking of you while we shovel our first highland snowflakes. We are glad to hear that The Newberry Library is interested in having your papers in their marble halls! Congrats. Best wishes as ever, Charlie & Lynn

Doorstep (Miller Charles H.) Along our half-mile meadow this monument awaits, unearned by us, a heaped-up legacy from our departed colonials, a rough longhouse of lichened rocks and stones that tripped George Washington's men, grey-faced green-tint, purple, quartzite and red. All kinds and shapes unearthed by first or plow, lugged here by muscle plowmen or stone-boated by ox to the growing heap. 'And still they pop up like perennials,' said old Doug, the last dirt farmer here.

Now we mount our monument to creen across our clover meadow, once a woodland slope, then stony-batter pasture.

We spy a buried layered table rock that took tempestuous eons to form itself for our doorstep. We pry it out and prop it up with lesser stones. We step across dumb rock. But we hear striated voices rise from unrecorded centuries. We tap our feet on a prehistoric slab, and we turn to face a time that teeters on roiled rocks of the past.

Charles Miller Health December 1988