September 20

This year our television is bigger than we are. Today is September tentieth. Twelve years ago Tony and I left in the Frieghtliner together. Tony was in his last month of being fortynine.

Once upon a time, when I was a girl, I'd tremble waiting for my boyfriend. It was a miracle when we could finally spend the entire night together. No going home. Devastation felt like a fist in the belly that woke me up sweating night after night. And then the years, crashing into the world, into life, like falling down a flight of crowded stairs, slamming your elbow, the back of your skull, your bones, not being able to reach out, to catch on.

Tony and Penny: there are parts of ourselves that complement the quirks, the eccentricities. I have the horses, the goats, the dogs, the cat. I can not stop building the future. Tony knows how to sit still. I speak the words, the grammar, know the spelling, write the page, the next page and the next. Tony doesn't realize he hasn't answered.

Tony and I park the yellow Focus, the red pickup, so that when we wake up we can see the barn from our bed. We say it is a painting. It is our own painting.

The hike yesterday to Cathedral Rock took the entire day. Fifty miles from our house to the end of the road at Salmon La Sac. Potholes and washboard. But the new trekking poles took ten years off our steps. Nothing but up. Half way, Squaw Lake, clear as glass, green reeds at one end. A fish. A duck. Sandwiches, homemade sourkraut, fermented not the vinegar kind. Then up and up and finally Spinola meadows and the ponds with Cathedral Rock image on the surface. The dogs splashing and the reflection wobbles. We sit in the short grass behind a white rock blocking the wind. Dogs roll. Eyes close in the sun, our last hike of the year.

Going down takes forever. I stop to take a photo of Mount Stuart. I set it off center but when I push the button my hands shift to symmetry. This picture is dead center.

By the time we get to the gas station it's already dark. Up the driveway in the dark, the goats bellowing. My white mare is standing alone outside the fence. The gelding waits smug in his turnout. I say I'll get Kansas and close the gate. You'll feed the grain.

Kansas isn't scared like she was last winter when she found herself on the outside in the dark. She knows her home.

Will you help me in the morning? Eight o'clock, I'll load the pickup with my tack. Will you hitch the trailer? I'll brush Kansas and lead her up. Of course you say, of course you will.

Colorado 2011

We do not have the time. We do not have the money. Somehow we are driving 1,100 miles each way. Take the truck. Sleep at the top of Dead Man's Pass in Oregon in the rest area. Trucks all night. Different in a pickup than a big truck. Next night in the rest area above Salt Lake, it's getting quieter. There is a train. And then we make it to Dick and Kay's new place, Colbran. There are yellow flowers and Dick has on his irrigation boots. He is eighty one. Molly drives her two burros down from Oak Creek. Molly is seventy. She told her oncologist to assume she is sixty. Kay and I drink margaritas on the porch with one giant white dog, three border collies and one spaniel. Humming birds. Gold sun through the ivy. Two rams out past the fence, one has curved horns. The sheep are filing down the pasture to the barn. Red angus, fat and shiny.

Molly, Tony and I sleep in the bunk house. In the morning Fred will come in and take the plumbing apart. He pours bleach in the tank. We can't use the bathroom for twenty four hours. It's Fred's computer that has been moved out of the bunk house onto the porch. Molly and I tell Kay that Fred is passive aggressive. Kay says when we figure Fred out let her know.

We all hike the first day and four of us on the last day. Dick's neuropathy acting up. We hike at 11,000 feet. The land spills away from us on both sides. Kay says when she was young both families, both grandmothers, and all the cousins got together in the summer, every summer. Kay says that the older she gets the more important these times are to her. At the ranch she shows us the "no heat cooker". It is a two and half foot square wooden box. Inside is a round piece of granite, four inches thick. The rock goes in the fire then it goes on the metal plate inside the box. The round metal pan goes directly on the rock. Then the quilt and then the top of the box. The white paint is peeling from the wood. It belonged to Kay's grandmother's.

There is only one day out of the three that it rains. In the Rockies, the clouds are iron weighted and we are cold pricked by rain. We drive in one pickup truck, wending south through Delta and Montrose, the Chinese Buffet where Dick laughs and jokes while he puts grapes and noodles side by side on his plate. We stop in Ouray. File into the hot spring dressing rooms and out into the hot pools. Kay sinks against the hot water. One hundred and six degrees. Her feet are finally warm she says. A young man pulls himself through the water to hear Dick telling stories about the swather, the sixty years of haying mountain meadows. I do the breast stroke, over and over and over. Count the bubbles, the rhythm and pulse, float upon the water.

By the time I get back to the bunk house my tooth will hurt so much, I just go to bed. But we made it. We all made it this year.

We leave at eight, after dinner. After steaks cooked on the BBQ. Dick has his straw cowboy hat on with the sides tightly rolled like they do in Colorado and he has on his turquoise pearl button shirt. Danny, who lost his license again, and his girlfriend who drives him, bring grilled asparagus, potato salad and roasted corn from Palisades. There is watermelon from Green River. Barbara just came in from the zoo in San Francisco. She leaves in a week for the endangered animal school in England. Her hair is red, part of it caught in a braid. She has Dick's nose. She'll sleep in our used sheets tonight in the bunk house.

I look across the table, the smoke blown in from the grill. Kay is saying that my ex husband, when I was nineteen, that Terry, is the one who brought her home from the hospital. Three days in the hospital after the horse wreck, and Dick didn't even pick her up, sent Terry who she never really liked. My mouth is already moving, turning in Dick's direction and I am saying: I've heard Kay say this same thing before Dick and she's really angry. You better do something pretty soon Dick! Everybody is laughing. Kay is laughing.

Starting home we skip the interstate. State route 13, in the dark, the mountain sides, the deer, up through Rifle, into Meeker, finally Craig. All the names that have sat along beside me, in front of me, to the side of me. And there is the Sleeping Giant bathing in the moon light. Arms crossed over her chest. It's when I shut my eyes, there are so many doors I now see shutting, that have already closed. Tight. Yampa. Taponas. Dan-Dan-the Fish-Man found dead in his camper. But wait. Maybe, still a breath of air, a slight breeze blowing. Fingers working their way under the next door sill. We are not done yet.

Surprise Lake, 40 miles west of Levenworth, Stevens Pass

The bed-rock of hiking is finally the minutes when you have given up the destination. Purity of movement. Sweat soaked, blue checked shirt. The right foot passing the left, left passing the right.

Red columbine, blue bells, pale trillium and the Canadian dogwood pass within the dry suck of breath. Arms swing side to side propelling and knees are thick. I do not raise my head to look at the peaks, the clouds, how the sun shafts through the evergreen branches. I see my old brown boots, not picking the rocks, but splash through the shallow creek. I see the roots ahead then passing underneath, then my mind analyzing the slope of the next boulder, my eyes searching for toe holds. I hear the drum of the beaten trail as if the skin of the earth holds a hollow. These are the only minutes that I am no longer the observer but for even a few breaths pass into being another animal in the forest.

This instant I am not set apart.

At this lake I settle on a boulder, an island, eat the cheese sandwich and drink a quart of water. Then I curl up on the rock. Tuck my knees, close my eyes. Feel the clouds, wet and clammy, until the sun moves back, slides softly like warm silk against my skin.