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.

This morning I am sitting within fifty yards of the Rio Grande, just outside Alamosa, Colorado. In late February I will be camping alongside the same river in Lajitas, Texas. In both places the river will be about the same width. I could easily throw a rock across it. I suppose, running as it does through land that is mostly desert, it just never has a chance to get as big as some of its sister rivers. Plus it’s the US/Mexico border so there are lots of people using its waters.

I took my first bath and massage in Hot Springs, Arkansas in the first years of the 21st century. The idea of another person bathing and massaging me, was strange, but I persevered and found it comforting. Eventually, the massage became part of my health maintenance routine, and now my massage therapist is a vital weapon in my battle with age and despair. When my muscles knot, my head refuses to turn, or my back aches, she reaches inside and chases away the demons.

I’ve hiked to the edge of the South Rim in Big Bend National Park, and the top of Guadalupe Peak in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, but yesterday, I took an equally satisfying ride in a gondola to the top of Sandia Mountain in the Cibola National Forest just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. We went for the views and watch the sunset, and I got both cases. It was especially impressive being so close to the mountain as the gondola climbed. It was the easiest peak I've ever done.

I’m on the road, sitting in a hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico, waiting for the sun to rise. It’s the first leg of our pilgrimage to Red River, where we commune with friends and listen to music. We added this stop because a musician friend of ours has moved back home to care for her ailing mother, and we miss her and wanted to show our support. She joined us for a late dinner and later today will show us around the old town before taking us up a mountain to have a drink and watch the sun set.

I really like this idea of multiple universes. That each of us might be our own universe. Or maybe we’re just thin slices of a bigger universe. And we’re only that which we have observed. So, this means what I’ve observed is different than what other people have observed. And I used to think that all of this was impossible, there’s only one universe, but then I realized, I had no idea the moon existed until I saw it, and no idea what to call it until someone told me, and that was just something everyone agreed to. So, until I saw it, it didn’t exist, and there was no reason for me to believe that it did or would.

I’m still in my book with my quantum theories and now I'm in the multiverse phase which implies, almost in comic book fashion, that nothing happens until it's observed and all possible outcomes in all possible combinations exist in their own universes and there’s more to it than that from a physics standpoint because there’s something about a wave not collapsing that I don’t totally get.