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This is my first full excerpt from NaNoWriMo land, to celebrate (finally!) reaching 5k words today. I am on the right track! Enjoy and good luck! :)

She hated the rainy days. The main joy of always travelling, for her, was seeing new places, soaking in the sights over the long miles through the semi’s big windows. The rainy days turned exciting new sites to a dull grey, where nothing seemed exciting and everything seemed bland, like Wonder bread. The rain streaking down the windows made the miles to the next stop seem endless, with only the occasional squeak of the wiper blades or her father’s occasional quiet conversations over the radio with other truckers the only change to the unrelenting sound of raindrops on steel.

            But she far preferred the rainy days over the snowy days. Sometimes they just stayed at a truck stop on snowy days, if they had to cross a pass that was too icy even with chains. Very occasionally they would stay in a hotel, but not the cheap flops the other truckers stayed in. They stayed in bed and breakfasts or small quaint inns, anything her father could find that spoke of someone’s home, because it was there her father could take a break and occasionally leave her with the owners and disappear for awhile.

            The first few times he left her, she was inconsolable. She panicked and could not be calmed, convinced that he was never coming back, that the bad people at the State would come and take her, put her in foster care with strangers and force her to be like them, force her to stay in one place. But her fear ebbed each time he returned, never more than 12 hours away from her. The older she was, her father told her, the harder it would be for the State to take her away.

            “Just keep passing the tests they set, little mustang, they won’t have grounds. They’ve got to have grounds, as your mother used to say, and you pass their tests, you stay clean and well fed, they got no grounds, the nosy States men. Think they know what’s best for everyone, what’s best for my growing girl!” At this point, her father would usually launch into one of his anti state rambles, how they had to right to poke into his life, all the fees he had to pay and the trouble it took to keep his daughter with him on the road.

Perhaps I should back up first. This is a supposed to be a memoir, and typically these things begin at the beginning. But considering the complications involved, who is to stay where my beginning is? Does it start with my grandparents, both sets of them? How they were born, raised, met, produced my parents? Or does it begin earlier than that, with my first ancestor to stow away on a boat to America? It is hard to say where any story begins, really, because every story is only the beginning or the middle of someone else’s story. For truly, there are no ends to story, only the end to a chapter.

I’ve been edited already, it seems. Not even a page in, and I’ve been told I’m rambling. But this is my story, so I can ramble as I want to. Or perhaps not, seems like that is what the journal is for. This is a memoir, and must flow. Such is what I’ve been told, to get on with the story. Fine, I’ll pick a beginning.

It was never known where my father got his wanderlust from. As marked in the family graveyard in upstate Michigan, my father’s family was unmoving and unmoved, solid as the oak tree that sits dead center of the cemetery. The town is named for my many times great grandfather, who helped found the town, or rather hacked it out of the surrounding forest and then refused to leave. Against all hardships, be they natural, human or economic in nature, the Gwinn’s refused to move. They had done the work to cut life out of the wild northern forests, and they would damn well going to keep it that way.

It is said in each generation of my father’s family there is a black sheep, a member that doesn’t quite fit. Usually this can be explained away, and the individual does not usually leave the fold, rather preferring to stay, however uneasily, with the known. When your family pretty much owns the town, from the general store on up to the community college, it can be hard to escape. Which is why my father surprised everyone; he actually left. He left, and he never came back, not to stay.  Oh, he would bring me around for visits, to show me off and make sure I knew his family, his woods and his lakes, but we never stayed for very long, and he never left me there alone. My father, black sheep that he was, knew his family. They took in any lost chick that came along, and considering how my father raised me, in their eyes I was, if not a lost chick, certainly a misguided one.

There was a good reason we never stayed more than a week. After about 5 days of well meaning women exclaiming over our ‘predicament’ as they called it, my father would start to grind his teeth. Loudly and often. That night he would pull me aside after dinner and tell me to make sure my things were packed, we were leaving soon. Once we even left before Thanksgiving dinner. As I was putting on my coat to walk out the door, amid a storm of protests, mainly from my female relatives, my father had had enough.

“How am I supposed to enjoy that damn bird Mike shot if I can’t open my mouth because I can’t hold my tongue if I do? As bad as the State, you bunch all are! Don’t expect us for Christmas, you nattering biddies!” I still remember the absolute silence that followed us out the semi, right on down to the newest baby still at the breast. All that could be heard as we marched across the snowy lawn was the football game, but for those moments at least no one was watching the TV. They were watching us, my father and I, as he helped me into the truck, swearing under his breath the whole time.

My father didn’t often swear. In fact, he didn’t often speak, and that was something he did get from the men in his family. Iron bred and born, to hard lands and hard lives he told me, and so the family filled my head with stories when we visited, which always ended in “But none so hard as what you have to deal with dear, stuck in that truck all hours of the day and night!”

I was young the first time we visited my father’s family, around 6 or so. That may seem a long time before meeting one’s grandparents and extended family, but considering our lives up until then it may not seem so strange. My father has a long memory, and the event that prompted him to leave home loomed large in his mind, a wall between himself and his family. That was, until I began asking questions, and I would not relent. I had to know, everything I could, and I wouldn’t stop bugging my father until he relented one spring and took me to his home.

Half a day’s drive outside of Gwinn, the family town, my father stopped. He just pulled over the side of the road, turned off the truck, and turned to look at me. Even that young I knew something serious was coming, as my father only turned the engine off when we stopped for a long rest or bad weather. As the sky was perfectly clear, without even the wisp of a cloud, I paid attention.

He was quiet a moment, and when he finally spoke it was if the wild horses he nicknamed me for were pulling the words from between his big white teeth. “My family is going to love you. They will dote on you, exclaim over you, give you things. They will be as nice as can be. But they will tell you stories, of how wonderful it is living in one place, of being surrounded by family. They will try to convince you to stay with them. They will badger me to foster you with them, mentioning home cooked meals, a real bed, friends your age to play with. I bring you home to visit, and to see if this is really what you want. You know what our life is like, on the road. We’ll stay for two weeks, so you can know what it is to stay in one place.” He was quiet for a bit, so long I thought his speech was over. He faced away from me then, and gripped the big black steering wheel that I was never allowed to touch. This time the words sounded like boulders, so hard it was for him to speak the words. “If you really like it here, I can foster you with some cousins, and you can stay. But if you choose to stay, you stay for good, not for a little while. If you stay, I’ll visit, but you won’t see me often. If you stay, you’ll become one of them.”

Looking back now, those last words were probably designed to terrify my 6 year old self, to fill my head with terrors and gnomes and goblins and evil fae as were in the stories he read to me at night, the kind that stole babes from their cribs at night. If that was my father’s intention, and knowing him it probably was, it worked. I sat stiff for the next four hours, as the endless northern forest flashed by outside the windows, terrified of people I’d never met. Needless to say, my fright made me initially shy of my father’s family, another point against him and his way of raising me in their eyes, I’m sure.

It was the children on that first visit that coaxed me out of my shell. We had arrived on one of the first true days of the short northern summer, and everyone had a frantic kind of energy, and the kids stole me and escaped the adults. That was the first time I remember really experiencing nature, and on that day the verdict was a definite yes. I loved rolling in the mud, climbing giant trees and then promptly diving out of them into the dark blue waters of the lake, digging up worms and eating them whole, much to the astonishment of the boys in the group. We ran wild for the entire day, and my gaggle of cousins showed me every conceivable way to get in trouble available to the pre-teenage set of northern Michigan. We finally straggled home at dusk, completely filthy, scratched up, most of us missing some article of clothing. Even my father burst out laughing at the sight of us, while the woman screeched, probably, I realize now, at the laundry we represented.

I remember my father’s middle brother’s second wife, who for some reason was matriarch of that part of the clan at that point, refusing to let us in the house as we were. Instead, she lined us all up in a row on the front lawn and turned the hose on us, despite how cold the well water was. She made each of us strip in the mud room and come in one by one to bathe in lukewarm water, which still felt heavenly compared to the hose water. Only when the entire gaggle was clean did she send everyone but her two sons and her daughter on to their respective houses in borrowed clothing, with notes for their parents as to what we’d been up to. I didn’t know it then, but included in the note was a message for the adults concerning me and the part I’d played in the day’s wildness.  Or rather, that I was the cause of it.

To a 6 year old, time is meaningless and ever changing. That week was the longest of my life, never seeming to end, and yet I didn’t notice how time was flying. There was always somebody to talk to, somebody willing to play, and I barely slept that week, as the slightly older kids taught me the meaning of “sneaking out” every night. We were too young to get into serious trouble, but if you’ve never been a bored country kid you cannot understand what trouble we did cause. No amount of lectures, grounding, going to bed without dinner, or any other punishments deterred us. The adults told my father that I was a bad influence on the rest of the kids, heightening the usual wildness of early summer. We were an incorrigible lot, and nothing would deter us. We were so crazy that we even annoyed the teenagers into turning us lot in one night, so that we were locked in the stuffy attic so there would be no way of sneaking out, for that night at least.

Those two weeks were a completely magical time for me, utterly different from anything I’d known in my short life. We swam every day in one of the various lakes, we got filthy in a hundred different ways, and they introduced me to country life. I rode a pony for the first time during that visit. He was an incredibly hairy beast of indeterminate ancestry, a placid animal that was content to ignore the antics of us kids in favor of stuffing his face.

One night in the middle of our time in Gwinn, we snuck out and met the rest of the kids our age as had become our usual habit. Someone suggested cow tipping, but we’d already been caught once and we’d done it already anyway. I wanted to see the pony again, for one look in the pony’s huge brown eyes had caught my attention. The other kids tried to deter me, but they wouldn’t say why, so I ignored my new friends. I really wanted to see that pony again. Off we went to the pasture next to a cousin’s barn where some horses and the pony lived. It wasn’t long after we snuck into the pasture that I learned why my new found friends had tried to convince me that this, at least, was a bad idea. The utterly gentle pony by day was an altogether different animal by night.

As I had done earlier that day, I crept up to the pony’s side and hopped on. This was not the right thing to do, because as soon as my butt hit his back, the little pony went nuts, racing off across the pasture, starting a stampede among the other horses in the pasture with him. To this day, I don’t know how I managed to hang on for that wild night ride, except to say the inhuman strength of a terrified child. Eventually the pony, out of shape from winter and fat on good spring grass, came to a blowing, snorting halt, as far from my friends as he could get. I remember him looking back at me, seemingly affronted that I was still on his back, my fingers hopelessly tangled into his mane. He sighed gustily, just the once, then dropped his head to keep grazing.

That was one story we never told the adults. Some things grown-ups are better off not knowing.

At the end of the two weeks, my father sat down with me to a huge breakfast as was usual for his household. Heaped in front of me, my cousins and the adults were chocolate chip pancakes, sausages, canned fruit leftover from the winter supplies, and orange juice. I was just reaching for another pancake when my father put his hand on mine.

“It’s time, little mustang. Stay or go?” This was more typical of my father. I’d hardly seen him during the past wild weeks, spending as much time as I could with my various cousins. With a child’s utter self involvement, I hadn’t thought how he’d been faring, back among his family after so long away.  Now I did, with a guilty startle, even as I looked longingly at the pancake out of the corner of my eye.  Even now, so many years later, I don’t really know why I chose as I did. As an adult I can see the pros and cons, weigh them and come to a rational decision. But I was a child, 6 years old, and no wonder how wonderful the past two weeks had been, I just wanted my father.

“When are we leaving? And where are we going this time?” Just as he was a man of few words, so was my dad a man of few smiles. But I remember clearly how big his smile was at my answer, how it turned his square dark face so that even my cousins noticed his happiness. For that leave taking, at least, there were no protests.  Several other members of my father’s family were truckers, although short hauls at that, and they knew how lonely the road could get for a man.

We were packed off into the truck with many carefully packed leftovers, both from recent meals and stores from winter, and many admonitions to visit for the holidays, or just any old time, they would always be there.

It wasn’t long after that visit that I started pestering my father again, wanting to know more about my family. I had been introduced to more than wildness during our visits. My cousins has badgered me with questions I could not answer, such as “Where’s your mom?”, “Did a stork deliver you?”, and “Why don’t you stay in the same place?” The other questions were easier to answer, the day to day ones. “What do you eat? Do you get McDonalds all the time?”, “Where do you sleep?” and most importantly, “What do you for fun?”

I told the cousins my age my stories over those two weeks, how my father would stop in a hotel with a kitchen once a week and cook like mad for a day, then freeze or package up all the food to fit in the tiny fridge in the sleeper part of his rig; how we only ate at a restaurant when my father got his paycheck; how I was always responsible for cleaning up dinner, so my father could catch some sleep. I told them how I was learning to read, books my father had found for free along the way, or when I was bored reading the truck manuals. I told them how my favorite activity, aside from reading, was drawing, and I showed them some of the things I’d drawn, not in childish crayon but in colored pencil. With long hours in the truck and little else to do, I worked hard on my drawings, which turned out not to be your ordinary stick figures. In my drawings there were hardly any people, mostly mountains and rivers, trucks and roads, snow and blue skies and corn fields.

Thus ensued a coloring challenge, with the winner getting ice cream. With a cherry and colored sprinklers on top. That was the also the first time I had won anything, and that was some of the best damn ice cream I’ve ever had.

But such moments in time are fleeting, and I soon forgot most of my time with my cousins. But two things stuck out, two things that made my time with my father in his semi anything but endless. With a six year olds ability to fixate, I wanted two things: I wanted to know everything about my family, and I wanted a pony.

Oh, go ahead and laugh. How many 6 year old girls love horses? Plaster their walls with rainbow unicorns and frolicking foals, devour the Black Stallion and the Thoroughbred series, play with their Breyer’s and beg for a pony for Christmas? How many young girls try to convince their parents that a pony can fit in a garage? How many of those young girls actually grow up to have anything to do with horses, you ask? Well I did. So just hold the skepticism for awhile, and I’ll show you. Think more quietly, or something.

My father had made it clear at a very young age that while we lived on the road there would be no pets. None means none. No dogs chewing everything up, no lap warmer cats, no hamsters, not even a fish. None meant none. It didn’t help that my father was allergic to dog and cat fur or that he really didn’t like animals. At first I’d tried to argue with him, pointing out all the other truckers with some sort of companion animal, mostly cats, even one couple we met at a truck stop in Oklahoma with a golden retriever. My father’s answer was the same, so all the animals in my life up until that first visit to his families were either ones I drew or read about.  Of course there were dogs and cats, a few gerbils among my cousins, as well as various farm animals, but nothing captured my attention so much as that shaggy, bipolar pony. But no meant no, so back on the road we were also back to our pet-less status. Since I made no headway in the “I’m sure the pony will sit in the front seat with me! He can sleep in the trailer at night!” I badgered my father with questions about our family.

It took about a month, but I finally got at least a general sense of the story of my parents, or at least what a six year old can understand. My father had escaped Michigan at 17, lying about his age and somehow managing to graduate from trucking school before he turned 18 and could legally drive a semi. At first he mostly drove mail trucks for short hauls around Texas, as that is where he’d gone to trucking school and he liked the change in weather. But he quickly grew bored of returning home most nights to his tiny apartment over a pawn shop, and also just plain tired. The pawn shop was not in one of Houston’s better neighborhoods, and it attracted all sorts of unsavory characters (it took me a few months to figure out what “unsavory” actually meant). When he was finally old enough to actually be legally driving, he signed up for long hauls, where he rarely returned to a home base. He found this suited him, as he rarely had to speak to anybody or deal with any bs (it took me longer to figure out that one) and that for the most part he could be completely self sufficient. On one of his first cross country hauls, from Houston to Los Angeles, he met a few truckers who owned their own rigs, called sleepers, and contracted out to various companies, carrying cargo they were certified for, anything from hazardous materials to livestock to expensive cars. These truckers didn’t introduce my father to the concept of self-employment, as that was a founding principle of the original members of the Gwinn family (the crazy ones that hacked a town out of the north woods) but it had not occurred to my father that he could attain it so young.

My father pried himself out of his shell to ask these guys how they managed it, to be trucking all the time and self employed. He learned it was all about the connections you made, and saving up the money to buy your own rig and maintain it, never a cheap proposition. You had to be able to roll with lean times and keep up with more loads than you could deal with both in turn, but the stumbling point for my dad was the big rule the truckers told him. To be a self employed long haul trucker, the kind that seldom went home, you had to give up a family, for as long as you wanted to be on the long haul. This was in the days before Garth Brook’s song about the trucker who comes home and finds his wife was cheating on him, but these truckers already knew that truth, most of them personally.

Now, all you’ve heard about my father is that he was a black sheep and escaped his family, which may have lead you to believe that he wasn’t much for family. In fact, the opposite was true. My father was one of those men born to be a father, to be surrounded by children, to kiss his wife before sleep every night. In the town of Gwinn, there was ample opportunity for that, seeing as how that is what the majority of his family did. But there was too much restlessness in my father to stay in the north woods, no matter how much he longed for his own children. He wanted to see in person what he’d only seen in bad color pictures in encyclopedias, to experience the wider world than was available in the tiny, isolated north woods town of his birth. He wanted to see how other people lived, to experience everything different from the way he was raised. My father wanted to travel, but he also wanted his own family, to share the world beyond Gwinn with. All the girls my father’s age in his town had no desire to go further than Green Bay, which is to Gwinn what Manhattan is some random tiny town in upstate New York. So my father left, and bulled his way through trucking school, but he never lost his desire for someone to share his life with.

For these men, experienced and in some cases well weathered truckers, all men, all single regardless of their age, to tell him that he could just throw his hope of a family to travel with him in the dust, it was a blow. It hit hard enough that when he reached Los Angeles, he dropped off his load of cars and found a job in the warehouse district, unloading the trucks he had learned to drive. He found another tiny apartment, this time above a palm reader’s shop in Oakland, and tried to settle down and forget the road. In a choice between trucking and family, or at least the possibility of family, my father’s choice was clear. Even though he was escaping his upbringing, deep down my father was still a Gwinn and for Gwinn’s family is everything that is needed. With family the world is a manageable place, with family you can bring in the harvest and fill the woodpile for winter, know someone is there to carry the load when you are sick or, in typical Gwinn style, carve a town out of the wild northern forest and stay there forever.

My father’s first attempt at staying in one place failed. Oakland was far too different from anything he’d known, and far too crowded. He still wasn’t in the best part of town and in order to keep his tiny apartment he has to work 60 hour weeks, unloading and preparing trucks for their next trip. He lasted a month before he signed up for another trucking gig, this time weekly trips between Oakland, Phoenix, and San Diego. 

Thus began a four year period in my father’s life, during which he changed jobs about once every two to three months, always with the goal in mind of staying in one place long enough to find a girl. Not just any girl, oh no. Despite what the truckers had told him, this was the age of the hippy, when half the country seemed to be on the move. My father picked up every girl hitch hiker on the side of the freeway, spent long hours talking with them, convinced that at least one of them had to a girl tough enough to keep up with him, or at least loose enough to go with him, to fight against staying in one place. None of them ever did, and at that point I didn’t get the juicy details of how many saw the tiny bed that is generally included in long haul rigs. I was only 6, almost 7. Those are not details that you share with your baby girl.

Eventually my father figured out that no matter what town or city or hamlet he ended up in, or what back breaking job he took or what tiny apartment he lived in, or how many cute or not always sober girls he picked up on the side of the highway, finding his wife was going to take a bit more effort. This was in the days before Craigslist or online dating, so that was out. Finally my father was fed up. His attempts to find a woman to travel with him had all busted, in one way or another (I never did get all the juicy details of the few women he did live with for a few months. All I got where the names. Rosita, Mary Anne, Rhonda, and Jackie).

Five and a half years after escaping Gwinn, my father turned in another truck load,  of empty apple crates, this time in the not tiny but not huge town of Yakima, Washington. Already knowing that the endless round of 60 hour weeks unloading or maintaining trucks would a. Leave him little time or energy to find a wife, b. would only find him a certain type of woman, and c. would only remind him of the road he was supposed to have given up, my father tried a different tact. After turning in his load and accepting his paycheck, he hoofed it over to the local community college and signed up for basic classes. He had completed high school, he’d had to get through trucking academy,  but now he went further. After completing all the basic classes in 7 months, my father signed up for something completely different: CPA classes. He was looking for a job that would keep him in one place finally, day in and day out, that offered little travel, but still the opportunity to be his own boss.

Soon enough he discovered he enjoyed classes, if only for all the cute women that were finally entering college and taking classes.  After looking over the available crop, my father zeroed in on the one woman who had seen it all: Misty. She was the receptionist at the college, and she had been since she had marched up to the President of the college at the time when she was 16 and told him she had just dropped out of college, actually she had thrown down the stupid muffins they were supposed to be making in home economics class and walked out and didn’t stop walking until she reached the college and the office of the President, and she introduced herself as the college’s new receptionist. When he tried to have her escorted out, she started filing admissions requests while the entire office watched in dead silence. When he called tried to call her parents, she refused to give him the number. When he told her he could call the cops on her and arrest her, she asked him what she would be arrested for, being helpful? It was a combination of stubbornness as sweet as a sticky cinnamon bun and my mother’s typical impeccable timing that landed her the job that day, as the current receptionist had left three days ago to get married and start her family.

This story was a favorite of mine, and my father always imparted in a slightly awed tone, like he still couldn’t believe Misty’s audacity. My father actually heard that story from the college’s registrar, a small delicate woman who everyone knew to be the best cook in the world. No one could understand how that woman, whose name was Beatrice, hadn’t been snapped up by the first man to taste her cooking, but she reigned as the head of the admissions office at Yakima Valley Community College for four decades. She managed to remain unmarried and childless, despite having grown up in an era in which a single, childless woman was looked down on by society.

Now that my father had found his perfect woman-firey, stubborn, full of herself-he had to win her. Now, in case you hadn’t noticed yet, my father is not the best talker in the world. There was more than one reason he was drawn to trucking, and the fact that you could go days without exchanging a word beyond “Hello. Coffee black please” with another human being was a large draw for my father. But after 5 years of big chunks of time of that kind of isolation, he was pretty much fed up with that crap, as he told me several times, which is what drove him to enter school. With a more stable, higher paying job he’d be able to attract the type of wife he wanted. It was just his bad luck to fall in love with Misty, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

At first my father tried the traditional ways of wooing, learned from his older brothers in Gwinn: dead animals (which the women had to clean and dress and cook up, of course) flowers (to drive away the stench) and movie dates in his pickup truck, during which you do your best to reach a home run, or at least third base. Not surprisingly, all of these failed spectacularly with Misty. She’d already had all the dead deer she cared for, she told my father the first time he brought her home one, though it was nice of him to shoot it with an arrow instead of buckshot. An arrow made it easier to dress, she explained to him, standing on her front stoop late one morning, the deer hanging off my father’s tailgate. When my father just looked confused, she told him that was fortunate, because no way in hell was she butchering the dead deer my father was responsible for shooting, but if he wanted to bring her some nice deer steaks for her freezer and a nice big bowl full of deer stew she would eat that right up. Scratch one for my father, but it did always take my father years to learn he couldn’t do something.

Strike two were the flowers. Misty was allergic to most pollen, and besides, hay smells sweeter than flowers. So my dad now knew two things: Cook the dead deer before gifting it, and flowers were boring.  Next he tried an even more doomed to failure approach: The movie date.  The movie was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which was actually a good choice movie wise, bad choice date wise. As my father tells it, Misty loved the movie. But it was not the best movie to try to seduce someone to, no matter how good the ending actually is. At the end of that night, my father went home to his tiny apartment alone and did homework. So he told my 6 year old self, and it was not until years later that I learned what actually happened that night. It was not my father who told me, though. I pried it out of someone else.

My father tried his best to woo Misty that night, going all out. He had cleaned his truck, put on his cleanest clothes, and gathered a basketful of summer berries and dipped them in chocolate. That got my mother’s attention all right, as she snacked on them all through the movie, ignoring my father’s slightly fumbling advances. She ignored the light shoulder hug, the knee stroke, and she didn’t even feel the thigh squeeze as she was caught in the scene where the girl turns into a giant blueberry.  It wasn’t until my father’s hand drifted lower that she pulled her eyes off the screen and turned to face my father in his pickup. Caught at his attempts, he said the first thing that came to his head.

“I know you’ve heard this tons of times before, Mist, but, well, you are swell. I mean great. I mean…I mean….you are wonderful, Mist. Your courage alone puts every past President to shame. You are stronger than ten men, any ten men, and you can do anything you want. Anything you want, you, you just do it! I really really like you, Mist. You’re great.” It was the most words that my father had said at one time to her, and something about the way he said it, the words tumbling out of his mouth in a great rush, or the completely open expression he wore or the words themselves pierced the implacable wall she’d built around herself, keeping every other boozy smooth idiot guy out of her world.

Up until then, my mother loved her life. She had her good paying job at the college, secure in the knowledge that she could pay her own damn bills, thank you oh so very much. She could do what she wanted, she could have the horses she wanted and ride when she cared to, and there was no one in the world she had to consult on a decision, no one to tell her no. She could take classes for free when she wanted, or not as she wanted. But this man had just slipped into her life, and slipped past her “This is my life” wall with barely a ripple. Well, maybe a few clumsy splashes, perhaps.

The way my father tells it, he was alone the rest of the night. I know differently, now, that my mother actually took him home. Never one to do things the normal way, my mother led my father out to her barn, saddled up two of her horses, and threw my dad into the saddle on her old, dependable and solid grade mare, and off they rode into the mountains. They stayed up there for three days, seeing no one else but themselves.  They didn’t talk much that weekend, but then they didn’t need to. The first night my father trapped a rabbit and cooked for my mother, which she said was much better than the deer stew he’d made her.  They camped by a lake and went wandering around every day, either mounted or on foot. They held an impromptu polar bear competition that my father won, as growing up in the north woods has its advantages. That night they made a fire, and I can see them in my head, I’ve been told the story enough to know what happened that night. By firelight I was conceived, and by firelight I came into the world, nine months later.