When I first started this blog in 2014, when it was solely on Facebook, I got a comment one day that said, “So what?” It stopped me in my tracks and made me want to run and hide. But then I decided I was writing for myself and if people wanted to come and read it they were welcome, but I’d still write, regardless. In the beginning, it was mostly about nature and life in the Hill Country. Then, in a seismic shift, I started writing about my wife’s illness and later, her death.

It’s nineteen this morning with a light dusting of snow. Slightly peculiar weather for the Hill Country of Texas. Of course, we’ll take any sort of moisture the heavens decide to bring us even if it's in a more or less solid form. There’s also a strong north wind blowing which means wind chills and more cold air. I think the winter storm is scheduled to loosen its grip by the weekend, just in time for me to leave for Big Bend.

It was another day of mulching and mowing and yard work for me while trying to distance myself from the goings on in Washington D.C. Having convinced myself there’s nothing much I can do, having already voted, I had decided to let the big dogs eat and try to not watch or even comment. But I’m sensitive to the currents of history and I’m an interested citizen, so I look their way on occasion. Layoffs are the big news I see, and that’s interesting to me because I’ve laid off people before, and it was hard to do, especially because I delivered the news personally.

Life is funny. My great-grandmother, by whose house my house now stands, lived almost all of her life in this small Texas town where I now live. In fact, she died in the house next door while my youngest brother sat outside in 1968 and listened to his grandmother cry at the loss of her mother. It was the same year we lost our own mother. What a trying year for all. What’s strange to me, however, is that her husband, my great-grandfather, passed away in 1949, two years after my birth, and it felt to me as though he never existed. That he had lived and died in some long ago time. While it seemed my great-grandmother had lived for ages and had always been with me.

I caught a break yesterday, another in a long string of caught breaks that pretty much define my life. This time it was small, dental, but it was still a break that went my way. I had a cavity on a tooth with a crown. It could have required another crown, or a root canal, or even an implant. But all it required was for me to keep my mouth open while the dentist and his assistant worked. When they finished the cavity was filled and I was on my way. I’ll need a new crown at some point, but not today. And just like that I went from a big cost to a little cost.

Goodness. It’s cold outside. A nice reminder that February is still winter and even in Texas that means a chill air. Of course, as the temperature dropped yesterday, and I went to the store in a hoodie and a jacket, I still saw men and boys in shorts. And I’m still not sure how that’s comfortable and why men do it. It used to be that only boys wore short pants and men wore long. Now, short pants are ubiquitous, a symbol of freedom, I suppose. But in cold weather it’s a sartorial choice that makes me wonder.

Typically, when I speak of the garden beneath the big oaks, I mean the one closest to the house. The one I can see from my kitchen window. There is a second group of oaks, however, just beside it to the north and out of sight from the kitchen window. It is the garden of my concentration this spring. Left mostly to its own devices, it was home to Turks Caps, Spiderworts, Rock Roses, and the Prickly Chicken Band which is a collection of metal musical-instrument-playing chickens given to me on my 65th birthday, complete with stage.

It was also home, however, to bindweed, coastal bermuda, and hackberries. And those days are now over, at least for the bermuda and the hackberries. I’ve dug up the former and pulled up the latter. Where I can’t pull them up, I’ve cut them to the ground and covered the stump with a tin can. I’ll attend to the bindweed when it starts appearing later this spring. The prickly chickens and their stage, at the moment, are covered in leaves, and I hope to change that today.

It’s raining this morning, which is good for my back. It means no digging in the garden on my hands and knees. It will be a day of rest, and the payoff will be a moist garden once the rain stops. Nature finds a way, I guess, of taking care of children and old men. But even though I ache, I still also ache to keep going, to repair what neglect has torn asunder. It’s good to have a drive, I guess.

I am in overdrive. The weeds and grasses are flying out of the gardens; new stones edge the work. My big gate hangs, fixed; the star and the fleur de lis are painted and drying. I am getting ready for spring, because the gardens are getting ready for spring. Young bluebonnets are everywhere in the lawn and fields, and the Gregg’s Mist flower is sprouting, and the big oaks are shedding and the coral sages are budding.

I miss the Sunday paper. A massive ball of newsprint, featuring the comics (all in color), a big sports section recapping Saturday’s games, Parade magazine (a national publication), and an entertainment section talking about movies, music and books. The Houston Chronicle’s entertainment vehicle was Zest magazine. I loved walking out on Sunday morning, picking up the paper, then parceling out the sections to my wife and myself. 

I had a good post day yesterday. It resonated with quite a few people. And that’s good. Except now I have to try and do it again the next day, and that’s damn near impossible, because resonating insights aren’t just lying around for the picking. The best I can do today is say that I solved the NY Times mini crossword in 44 seconds and that puzzle had 17 clues. My puzzle solving friends will understand and everyone else will just go, so?

The other day my oldest son and I were talking about how nice it feels to be home from a long trip that involved a lot of hustle and bustle. To sit in my chair, in my home. To have nothing to do other than what I want. And we talked about how difficult it used to be right after his mother passed. To be alone in the house. And how different it felt now, and as I tried to sum it up, he said, “The quiet is comfortable again.”

Yesterday, after attending the funeral of a friend’s father, I found myself wandering around San Antonio on my way to have lunch with another friend. As I drove, I passed the front of Incarnate Word University and realized it was a lovely, ornate, old school sort of place. Then I passed what appeared to be a public garden, and then an art museum, and then I thought, I need to explore more of San Antonio.

This might turn out to be a pretty good day. I just solved the NY Times mini crossword in 50 seconds. Probably a record for me. If I hadn’t mixed up Monet and Manet it would have been under 50 seconds. Of course, I’m betting there are multitudes who routinely best the puzzle in a lot less than that. Still, it gives me a little buzz.

Travel. Especially long trips. Trips of more than two days. Always wears me out. It’s a litany of bathrooms with no room for dopp kits, showers with no water pressure, digging in bags for clothes, sketchy meals, and hit or miss beds. It was true in my youth as a business traveler and true now as a retired traveler. It’s the part that people who don’t travel miss or fail to understand. The pleasure of travel comes with a price and you have to be willing to pay it.

Home again. Home again. It feels good. We pulled out of Red River, NM around 8 a.m. yesterday, and I put my head on my pillow at 12:45 this morning. Two cars, eight people. We stopped for breakfast in Taos, and from there it was gas station food all the way home. New Mexico in the daytime is pretty, Texas at night is no great shakes, it’s blackness and the blinking red lights of wind farms, until you hit the blessed Interstate 10 with its 75 and 80 mph speed limit.

We went for a ride yesterday. Headed east out of town toward Bobcat Pass and then down to the town of Eagle’s Nest. It was a lovely drive. One I’d never taken before because we always come in from the west from Quest. The scenery was lovely and I decided I’d love to see the place in summer when the river was running and everything was green.

I am on the ground In Red River, New Mexico. This is my third trip to the Red River Songwriters Festival. There was heavy snow in the days preceding my arrival, and it snowed a bit yesterday upon my arrival. Then the weather cleared and now it is only clear and cold. Good winter weather for an old man who has never skied in his life and has no plans to start.

Snow has fallen, starting its work of covering the imperfections of earth. Whenever I see a first snowfall, I always wonder if this is how an ice age started. The snow came. It stayed. It came again. It stayed. Before the days of instant communication, how would humans have known what to do? Would going south have been a thing? Of course, we’re a long way from that. The weather people are keeping us apprised, we know when the snow will end, and even where it’s snowing.