Learning to Type

On the manual typewriter
in my father’s old workroom,
I tried to learn to type.

Repeat until perfect:

Pines come in packets.
Pines come in packets.

His desk—
a door laid on its side,
with packets of EKGs neatly bundled
on shelves above—
was my father’s
sanctuary
in a house full of chaos.

Now my study
is a tree house
surrounded by ponderosa pine.
Once it was a nursery,
and I held my son at night,
listening to the needles
scratch the window.

Spruce are sharp.
Spruce are sharp.

I lost my virginity
under the branches
of my parents’ blue spruce,
or so the story goes—
the needles sharp against my back.

Now I sit at the copper table,
my tea cooling,
and watch the birds
line up for the window feeder.

They wait in turn
on the snowy branches of our spruce.
A tree that was once
no taller than my middle daughter
has now outgrown the house.

Firs are friendly.
Firs are friendly.

We teach our grandchildren
to find the tails of little mice
burrowing deep
into the cones of firs.

My son-in-law says
it’s a Douglas fir—
a blue spruce
I’m sure—
that holds the nest
of the mourning dove
who watches
each summer
over my family.

But I never did learn to type.

By: Hope Rudebusch

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Hope Rudebusch lives in northern Arizona and spends her summers in Idaho. She writes about family, landscape, and the passage of time.