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Oh, never mind. Let the opportunity arise. I’d like to leave some room.

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Turkey vultures circle high overhead, but they’re not here for me. Maybe something in the neighborhood. There’s no telling what folks get into in these parts, especially since no one in the immediate vicinity has ever told me the whole truth about anything. (Dark underbelly of the code of the West.) Illegal loose dogs, illegal horses—one guy keeps a poor brown one in a tight little pen—no one owns the road, illegal everything. Houses with no plumbing or building permits. Old hippies with guns, too—the last time I visited, there was an assault rifle stashed in the low kitchen ceiling, ready to grab. Guys run stop signs at fifty miles per hour in a cloud of dust.

An appropriate backdrop for the national emergency. Just add Twitter. Trouble is, you learn more about the country than you ever wanted to. And here I thought I’d been around.

It was one of those quiet, bright afternoons with a cool breeze hissing lightly in the piñons, the kind that make you slow your pace to listen to the gravel crunching underneath your soles, the ones where you’re completely there. We’d just been to a movie, the first one in fifty years, I joked. A two o’clock matinee. “I loved the movie,” she said, “and then we came home…”

I walked twice to the mailbox to check for her New Yorker, which wasn’t there. Slowly, slowly each step, no cars on the dirt road, no one walking but myself, no dogs. Mountains all around, a raven on a pole. The warm sun on my legs.

The hollow scratching of the latch, a squeaky mailbox door. Nothing but a catalog for her and one for my dead mother, plus a thousand dollar check, the one her college friend with stage four cancer sent from Iowa so she could fly to see her. “Don’t think twice,” she’d emailed, “it’s like a pair of shoes to me.”

Dinner was corn on the cob from Taos Pueblo and hot dogs from Le Mars. We’d driven through Le Mars a few years ago on our way home from Dubuque. On that trip we crossed the wide Missouri at Sioux City to spend the night in an old hotel in O’Neill, NE that had pinball machines just off the lobby in an old saloon. (Our room smelled like extra quilts in grandma’s house.) On our way south the next day, there were turkeys by the road in every field. We’d never seen so many of the great wild birds. One climbed a pile of gravel to escape us. Turkeys can do anything, I thought.

It’s cold at night now, down to forty. Sunny days, finally, post-monsoon. Here and there the yellow leaves.

We’d just finished our Labor Day picnic dinner of ham sandwiches in the living room. The front door was open and the air was getting cool. I decided to change my clothes, since I was still wearing the same shorts and aloha shirt I’d put on to do a quick mile and a half walk earlier. As I stood there in my underwear, I realized I might as well just grab my fleece bathrobe instead. When I came out of the bedroom, I saw this amazing light at the top of the hill. A minute later I was two hundred yards from the house, in my bathrobe, taking this picture, and aren’t I glad I did.

If we find a house to buy in town, that’ll never happen again. On the other hand, if we don’t get the hell out of here soon, the next thing you know I’ll be jumping off the gorge bridge, and all the way down I’ll be thinking, geez, why didn’t we just rent a fucking condo? Meanwhile, just before our picnic in the living room, I found another dead pack rat in the trap behind the washing machine. That makes the fourth one in ten days. They steal cat food from the dish on the floor and stash it away wherever they can. This happens in broad daylight. I’ve found kibble in my pants, the washing machine, and glasses on the kitchen shelves. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.) At least we don’t have bears. We used to, but the pack rats scared them off.