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It was several years before she died. In the Christmas package from Austin was (among other things) a little red wind-up AM-FM radio with a solar panel for recharging. I’d always wanted one, and there it was. She must have known or guessed right since she knew me.

A radio for someone in the boonies used to be a precious thing before you just picked up your phone and watched TV. When I was living in my eight-by-sixteen handbuilt shack in Arkansas in ’71, I had a small transistor radio—that’s what we called them then—I’d bought in high school years before. I was so proud because I’d earned the money for it working after school folding ladies’ blouses at Mays Department Store in Massapequa, NY, and no one else I knew had such a thing. How this one followed me to the Ozarks is a mystery, but there it was. I’d stand there in my hut, freezing and stamping my feet, and listen to a station out of Fayetteville. My favorite song was “Maggie May.” To this day it takes me back to wet snow, the smell of rotting oak leaves, and enfoldment by surrounding woods where I was the only one around for miles.

As it turned out, I didn’t use the little red radio from Teresa all that much. I had the Internet for news and music, after all. But I took it with me when I camped and kept it on a shelf here, just in case. A couple of months ago I dusted it off and set it where I could see it, who knows the reason why. Two days ago it snowed again and gloomy clouds hung low like they still do. The frozen mud and isolation of el Norte settled in like truth and gave me pause. I placed the radio in the kitchen windowsill, where it might pick up a little charge, and this morning turned it on. All alone at home, I tuned it to an Alamosa, CO public station ninety miles away. The sense of deja vu was palpable: my sister, Arkansas, the winter, all the rest. A Roy Buchanan guitar solo crackled through the speaker while the battery ran down, and then all was still.

I’ll leave it there switched on. When the sun comes out again, the battery will charge, and slowly, quietly at first, the radio will come to life again, all on its own. Are people like that, do you think? When something greater than us reaches down and touches us, do we come back from the almost-dead and have another chance? Or do the years we missed corrode us so we drag the rust around forever?

I still can’t think of her without the tears. When I left Austin in May of ’75, I was so fucked up and drama-ridden, I’d forgotten to say goodbye. She came to the door the day before, her eyes all red from crying. (She’d baked some cookies to take with me on the road…) I see her now, and I could sob all day.

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We’re in the midst of some pretty grim weather for New Mexico. It snowed a little Thursday night, just slushy stuff, after a good long rain. Friday morning the clouds were down to tree-top level and stayed there all day. The air was wet and cold. You couldn’t see the mountains. The dirt road was beyond redemption. I know because I drove into Ranchos to pick up a package at the post office and had to navigate around the flooded craters.

The thing is, this is just an interlude. The real snow, six to ten inches of it, comes on Sunday. Maybe. And then some more on Monday, after which we see the sun again. Stretching out the blow makes a fellow tense and squirmy. We need a little sunlight, though. It pulls me through the fogged-up windows out into the universe, otherwise I fall into the trap. As my wife asked last night while I fidgeted beside the Ashley, warming up my butt: “Are you going to go online?”

“Uh, maybe. Why do you ask?”

“You’ve got that look…”

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My wife goes to an exercise place (Curves) at 6:30 a.m. five days a week. What a good deal all the way around. First of all, the routine really works. I’m the husband, pay attention. Second, she relays all kinds of gossip from the majority community, which I really dig. And third, after she comes home, I usually stagger out of bed, wave to her sitting in the next room having breakfast and tea with the cat on her lap, hit the bathroom, put on my bathrobe, pour a cup of coffee, and get to hear her say things like:

“I have to tell you something right away! There’s an elk’s head in the middle of the road in front of the banjo girls’ house!”

(Sometimes I think this is why I got married. Oh yes. Next you’ll want to know why we call it the “banjo girls’ house,” and I don’t blame you.)

I inquired further.

“An elk’s head? Does it have horns?”

“Yes,” she said. “They go back over its head like this.” [making swooping motion from front to rear]

“Really? Wow, that sounds like a bighorn sheep!”

No matter what it was, one had to go. I put my coffee down, pulled on shoes, a pair of jeans, and a hoodie, grabbed my camera, and left. There was only a short distance to walk. If it were the head of a protected sheep and I could get a photo, maybe it would help convict the poacher and bring a fine reward. Even a down payment on a house! (I walked a little faster.) Amazingly, the devil dogs that usually sleep in the dirt by the banjo girls’ house were nowhere to be seen. New Mexico is a land of miracles. This one more than compensated for the “just”-an-elks-head I saw when rounding the corner. The horns were sawed or broken off, as near as I could tell.

My wife drove off later for the grocery store. On her way out, a black dog (of course) was gnawing on it. When she returned, the head was gone. There’s a thing about skulls and such in this part of the world, so I hope it doesn’t come back or end up wired to the branches of a tree beside someone’s front door. Yes, I saw that once.

Local voodoo, maybe. Damn stuff is everywhere.

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Dear God, do I love B-25s. All these WWII aircraft make my little heart go pitty-pat, because I lived and breathed this stuff from a very early age. Since this is another image from my late Aunt Mary’s WWII photos from the South Pacific, I’m going to guess that this is New South Wales, Australia like the last one. The markings on the aircraft in the background is one giveaway, as is the civilian Shell truck apparently gassing up the B-25.

So how do I know the men in the foreground are hitching a ride?* They’re dressed for travel, not for combat—though the one on the right may be wearing a flight suit—and that was how officers got from one place to another in those days. In a similar vein, my father was an Army Air Corps advanced flight instructor in Texas during WWII. A couple of times when he had time off to visit his parents in Maryland, he just, uh, borrowed a fighter plane… Grumman Wildcats both times, I think, not the AT-6 Texan trainers he usually flew. He never did see active combat, which must have grated on him something awful. Not because of misplaced guilt, but from knowing he was missing out on something huge. If that sounds strange, here’s an observation from the comments:

Most of those guys left America as a teenagers and became men over night. They lived knowing that they might not come back every day. Those that did saw things that would haunt them for life.

Judging from the annotated pictures in my aunt’s collection, for some young Americans overseas who didn’t get blown to bits or bored to death, World War II was probably the greatest thing that ever happened to them. No one talks about that much, but I see the signs in the photos of the men and women in that Hopkins unit my aunt served in: exotic locales thousands of miles away from home, meeting all those people you’d never see again—despite the horror and the tragedies, the excitement must have been tremendous. They partied hard when they weren’t dealing with the wounded and the dying, too. The “beach party” photos fairly reek with sex appeal. War may be hell, but there’s another side that tempts us.

* I actually don’t, of course. But see the comments for more on this.