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The immaculate fall of the splitting maul. The ineffable release. The way the kindling flies apart, one half landing in the mud, the other off in drifted snow…

My wood guy just ran out of wood. They all do, it’s endemic. Now I’ll have to call up half a dozen strangers in hopes of keeping warm. This happens every winter in this place we haven’t left yet since I don’t know where to go or how to get there. Tonight my wife asked, “Where do we want to be?” and then apologized for making trouble. “No, no,” I told her, “perfectly valid question!” But let us be light-hearted. I just renewed the passports, after all. Self-driving man, I tell you. Sometimes I just sit there, staring at the scratches on the windshield. What I think we’d really like is to go home.

Callie the Wonder Cat didn’t quite make the deadline for the Apple “Shot on iPhone” contest. That’s because I took this one a few hours after, before I’d even heard of the thing, much less read the rules. It’s a good one, though, so I thought I’d post it.

We were married in front of our wonderful friends in Chestertown, Maryland on January 16, 1981. There’s a photo of everyone taken on the courthouse steps I’ll no doubt find when we move, which can’t come soon enough, either. We only had to walk about a block and a half from our apartment in the small Eastern Shore town. My wife wore a beautiful vintage hat and a perfect raccoon coat. I was in tails and a derby, oh my.

Afterwards everyone came back to our apartment and got drunk on champagne. By that time it had started to snow. Our landlord’s wife, one of the guests, needed a ride home to their house in the country and promised us dinner. The roads were slippery as hell as the light started to fade. When I came to the edge of town and turned left heading for Worton, my ’67 Saab started spinning counter-clockwise in the snow, directly in front of oncoming traffic, yet nobody panicked or screamed, being exceedingly well medicated. I remember feeling utterly calm and relaxed as the car slid slowly around in a circle and ended up pointing down the road where we wanted to go, perfectly placed on the right side of the road. I motored on through the gloom as if nothing had happened. We were invincible.

In a few months, we’ll have been twenty years here in New Mexico. We don’t own a home, I have credit card debt, and the last few years have been harder than most. All the losses and dyings, my God, who knew? All I ever wanted to do is live with my darlin’ and be a real man. Since I seem to be real and the lady’s still here, there’s nothing to prove in the end. The eternal boy on his seventh or eighth life with the heart of a lad and the soul of a thief, ambitious as ever and still shedding doubt. It’s never over, you know. We go till we stop.

She says when she first met me, she knew. I wasn’t that sure but fell so hard and never once wanted to leave. Happy anniversary, babe! It was all meant to be. I owe you my life and I’m yours.

There’s kind of a lot. That’s okay, though. As I always say, “Snow is fun for half a day.” On Saturday I shoveled for several hours and I’m still not done. My woodpile was completely covered. A stranger wouldn’t have known we had any firewood at all. The worst thing was when I used a broom to knock snow off the tarp, I suddenly had a much smaller supply.

I’m hoping for a window of opportunity tomorrow from 7:00 to 8:00 a.m. That’s when I’ll bust out in the 4WD Dakota [pictured] to buy a Sunday paper and a gallon of milk. By 9:00 a.m. it’s supposed to start snowing again, so… At least the errand won’t be boring. In weather like this, the local practice of ignoring stop signs and driving like my late brother Bill on meth rises to high art.