May 7
The weather warmed today and the snow began to melt. If it stays warm, the whole valley will be a mudhole by tomorrow. Sarah went into town again today, driving the four-wheel-drive through a foot of snow remaining on our road. Now we've got enough food to last us until the road dries out. Sarah told me they've got the flags in town at half mast again— something that happens far too often these days to honor the young who have fallen overseas. My neighbors express pride that so many of the young men have given their life for freedom. I wonder how their parents feel, if they too feel pride, or just the empty loss that I imagine must accompany the death of a child. Perhaps I am not qualified to imagine the feelings of those parents, for I have never had children. Neither with my first wife, Mandy, nor with my current wife, Sarah, have I been moved to procreate. With Mandy, I lived in Los Angeles, that cauldron of distraction and posturing. We had neither the money nor the time for children. We barely found time to speak to each other, much less to have sex. That is probably why she's now my ex-wife. It’s hard to maintain a relationship with someone you rarely see. Life with Sarah is different. We met while we both lived in Los Angeles, but from the beginning, we both knew we wanted something better than what that city had to offer: lives lived in passing, energy sucked out of us by the frenzy of the quest to fill up the holes in so many souls. We moved to Utah—escaped, some say, though we ran not from so much as to.
Here we live in a peaceful valley, our closest neighbor not very close, and we have to go to town to pick up our mail. Our house resembles little the mansions of the successful back in California, but it looks out on mountains from every window. In the summer, golden eagles soar above our land, and in the winter, bald eagles take their place. In the autumn, antelope bucks challenge each other in the sagebrush to the north, and in the spring, we plant our garden. We have a good life, Sarah and I, far from the troubles of the urban world.
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