I ran into a memory cloud yesterday. There was a brief pang of loss followed by a small pulse of tears. It happened on highway 83 coming out of Leakey just before you get to the turn toward Concan. I was on the road my late wife and I took occasionally as we travelled to Uvalde from Johnson City for our annual Memorial Day camping trips on the Nueces with family and friends. Except this time, I was turning left and heading to Sabinal and then on to Houston down highway 90 and Interstate 10.

Talk about well-travelled roads. That was our normal route to Uvalde from Houston and Alvin for river trips and Bracketville, further down the road, for hunting. The latter trips were ones my youngest son and I took. They were company sponsored father son adventures offered over the Christmas holidays. They were free. You only needed a son and time. I had both and off we went. We never killed a deer, but we rescued a raccoon stuck in a water tank, sat beneath a cedar tree as a flock of wild turkeys walked right beside us, and stood in a field as a herd of javelina’s grazed the grass around us.

Back to the memory cloud. It faded pretty fast as that sort of thing is want to do, partly, I suppose because it was unexpected. Anyway, I got to Houston, hooked up with my son and his wife and went to watch his daughter jump. And boy, did she, saving her best for last, when, in her sixth and final jump, she exploded off the board to fly 18’ 6.25”. It sealed her place in next week’s regional track meet. It’s what you expect great athletes to do, find something extra at the end. She’s on a good run for these final meets of her senior season, and today we’ll see if there’s more in the tank as she takes to the track. I suspect there is.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale