JUNE 27, 1999 · SUNDAY

I go up tomorrow.

I went by the post office Friday and filled out the card so my mail goes to the ranger station this summer, and Loyd will carry it up with the groceries every two weeks. If a letter comes, it will come on a mule.

Everything is packed in the truck: the notebook, the transistor, four pairs of wool socks, the coffee can, a sack of Bea's cookies, and six books from the library sale. Tess says she'll keep the computer warm.

Last thing I did tonight was go stand in the yard and look up at the high country, where the snow is nearly gone off the top of Kettle Point. You can't see the tower from town. But I know where it is.

JUNE 5, 1999 · SATURDAY

Drove up the ridge road this morning as far as the snow would let me, just to have a look. From the last switchback you can see Kettle Point with binoculars, if you brace them on the hood of the truck. The shutters are still on. It looks like a closed eye. There's snow in the saddle yet, and the ranger says three weeks.

I ate my sandwich sitting on the tailgate and looked at it a long while. A man at sixty ought to have better things to look at than an empty building on a rock. I don't, is the truth of it. Or I didn't, until February. Now I have a mailbox.

MAY 23, 1999 · SUNDAY

The district hired me back for a third summer. I got my radio card and my first-aid card renewed and bought new boots, which I will regret for the first ten days.

Still nothing from Oregon. Three months and a week.

Several of you have written to ask if I'm going to call him. I've thought about it. I have the address, and I expect I could get the number from the operator. But I told him he didn't have to answer, and I meant it. If I call, then I didn't mean it.

A woman in Minnesota wrote to say she didn't speak to her own father for nineteen years, and when he finally wrote to her it took her two years to write back. "Wait," she said. I printed that out at the library and put it in the notebook.

Maybe no answer is an answer. I'm trying not to decide that yet.

APRIL 25, 1999 · SUNDAY

On Tuesday there was a shooting at a high school in Colorado. The TV at the café was on it all week, and nobody in there talked much, not even the table of retired loggers by the window who never stop talking. I sat with my coffee and watched the parents on the screen, waiting to hear.

There's nothing I can say about it that's worth saying. I just kept thinking about the fathers. How every one of them would give anything for one more ordinary argument at supper. And how many ordinary suppers I passed up, on purpose, because I had somewhere to be.

No letter. Robins back. Mrs. Ostrander's tulips are up under her kitchen window.

MARCH 14, 1999 · SUNDAY

Sixty.

Four weeks today since I mailed it. I've done the arithmetic: a letter takes about four days to Oregon. So he's had it three weeks and some.

Bea made a cake with sixty candles, and Rudy stood by with the fire extinguisher out of his truck, for the joke. The grandchildren thought it was the funniest thing in the world. I did too, a little.

The government made me stop jumping at fifty-seven. Nobody makes you stop waiting. You have to do that yourself, and I'm not ready to.

FEBRUARY 28, 1999 · SUNDAY

Two weeks. I walk to the post office every day at eleven, after the mail's been put up, and I look through the little glass window in the box before I open it, so I'll know before I have to know. Bills. The electric co-op newsletter. A seed catalog meant for Mrs. Ostrander that came to me by mistake.

Rudy and I played cribbage Thursday. He's quiet when he plays, the only time he is. Halfway through the second game he said, "My old man never said one kind word to me in his life, you know that? Not one. And I went to his funeral and cried like a baby." Then he pegged out and beat me. I don't know exactly what he meant by it. I think he meant I shouldn't expect any of this to make sense.

Snow again tonight. The plows go by at four in the morning and I lie awake listening to the blades scrape, the way I used to lie awake at the base listening for the jump ship to warm up.

FEBRUARY 15, 1999 · MONDAY

I mailed it this morning.

Three pages. I won't put it here, because it belongs to him. But I'll say what I tried to do. I told him I wasn't writing to ask anything of him. I told him about the tower and the country and the dispatcher's voice. I told him I was sorry for the birthdays, and for the empty chair, and I tried not to be sorry for anything I couldn't honestly be sorry for, because he'd know. I told him where I'd be this summer and how mail gets to a lookout, which is on a mule. I told him he didn't have to answer.

The woman at the post office window weighed it and said it needed another stamp. I stood there like a fool holding my sheet of thirty-threes. She tore one off for me and licked it and stuck it on herself. "There," she said. "Now it'll get there."

I walked home the long way, by the river. It's open in the middle now, black water running between the shelves of ice.

JANUARY 24, 1999 · SUNDAY

Gail wrote back. Four lines on a card with a chickadee on it.

She said she was glad to hear from me. She gave me an address in Oregon, in a town on the dry side of the mountains. Then she wrote: "He's married. He's a good man, Arne. Be careful with him."

I've read that last part maybe forty times. I don't know if she means be careful because he'll get hurt, or be careful because I will. I think she means both. She always did know me better than I knew me.

JANUARY 11, 1999 · MONDAY

New year, new page. Tess taught me what she calls a table, which is how the words stay in a column now instead of running clear across the screen. She says it's easier on the eyes. My eyes turn sixty in March, so I'll take it.

I wrote to Gail on Friday. One page. I told her I was well, that I hoped she and Don were well, and that I'd like to write to Erik if she would give me his address, and that I'd understand if she wouldn't. I read it over Saturday morning and didn't tear it up, which is a record for me.

The stamps went up a penny yesterday, to thirty-three cents. I bought a whole sheet this morning, as if I'm going to be writing a lot of letters. Maybe I am.