A connection with the wife of a distant Hemingway cousin began several months ago after flipping through my mother’s address book and spotting her name. She and my mother were colleagues and remained friendly beyond their Maryland workplace, including with a visit to North Carolina after retirement where together the four toured the nearby Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site and goat herd in Flat Rock.
As requested I kept her posted about my mother’s passing. Today in reply she recalled the Sandburg trip and “fog comes on little cat feet” came to mind while typing. First published in his 1916 collection Chicago Poems, “Fog” came about while carrying a book of Japanese haiku in Grant Park, fog over Chicago harbor, and only a small piece of newsprint at hand—hence American haiku.
My folks met, fell in love, and married in Chicago. And like Midwesterner Sandburg, they spent their later years in the Blue Ridge Mountains, theirs in a town between Flat Rock and Asheville.
Sandburg passed away in North Carolina on July 22, 1967. His ashes were interred under a granite boulder called “Remembrance Rock” behind his birthplace home in Galesburg, Illinois.
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