These are the first pages, April to December 1998, from before I knew where this was going. The journal was called "After February" then. I've left them the way they were. -- E.V.

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Thursday, December 24, 1998

Christmas Eve. Meredith wanted me in Sacramento tonight and I said I would come Christmas morning, early, with the pies. Tonight I wanted to be in my own house.

I bought myself a present. Boots. The young man at the outfitter measured both my feet on the metal slide and told me my left foot is half a size bigger than my right, which nobody ever mentioned in fifty-six years. He had me walk up and down a little wooden ramp they keep in the store for that. Then he asked what I was training for and I said the John Muir Trail. Out loud, to a stranger, for the first time. He said, "Cool." That was all. I have decided to take it as a blessing.

Roger's old pack is up in the rafters of the garage, an aluminum frame with orange canvas. I got it down with the stepladder. It weighs as much as a small child with nothing in it. It smells like the garage, which is to say it smells like him. I put it back. I will carry something newer and lighter, and his compass, and his red bandana, which I washed and then wished I hadn't.

The tree is small this year. I did the lights myself and they are crooked. He would have fixed them. I left them.

Thursday, November 26, 1998 -- Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving in Sacramento. Phil carved. He did it the way Roger did, standing up, with the electric knife, and nobody said a word about it, and I loved him for not making a speech.

After the pie Meredith and I did the dishes and she said, "Paul told me about your trail thing." My trail thing. She said I'm fifty-six, I have never slept on the ground by myself in my life, there are bears, there is no telephone, and what happens if I fall. All of it true. I said I'd take the class. I said I'd train. She said, "Mom, Daddy is dead and you're going to go get yourself killed in the mountains to prove something," and then she was crying into the dishwater and so was I.

I don't think I am proving anything. I don't know what I am doing. I know I sit in that house at night with the television on for company and I am not alive in there. I didn't say that to her. I said we'd talk after Christmas.

Nora, who is seven, asked me at bedtime whether Grandpa is in heaven or in the cemetery. I said both, sort of. She said, "That's not how it works," and went to sleep.

Saturday, October 31, 1998

John Glenn went back up into space on Thursday. Seventy-seven years old. I watched the launch at Irma's across the street because her television is bigger, and when it went up she said, "Well. There goes your excuse." Irma has been a widow eleven years. She is the one who told me in March to get out of the house before the house ate me.

So I have decided. August 1999. The John Muir Trail, Yosemite Valley to the top of Mount Whitney, about two hundred and eleven miles. The books say three weeks for a sensible person. I will be taking a little longer than that. I am going alone, because there is no one to go with, and because I think it has to be alone. I can't explain that yet.

I signed up for the Saturday backpacking class at the community college that starts in January. I called Paul in San Jose. He was quiet a second and then he said, "Go, Mom." I haven't called Meredith. Thanksgiving is soon enough.

Tonight I am handing out little candy bars to pirates and princesses and one very small hot dog. Fifty-six years old and I just bought my first topographic map.

Saturday, September 12, 1998

I found his map.

I was cleaning out the garage drawer where he kept fishing licenses back to 1971 and warranty cards for things we don't own anymore. Under all of it, folded soft as a dish towel, was a map of the John Muir Trail with a pencil line on it from Tuolumne Meadows to Reds Meadow. His handwriting in the margin: "Walt & me, July 1961. 6 days. Rained 4." And then in newer pencil, darker, all along the rest of the trail down to Whitney, a dotted line. Dotted, like he was saving it. At the bottom he'd written "Summer '99 w/ Ellie??"

He never said a word to me about 1999. He said "someday." He said "when your knees and my back agree." I didn't know he had picked a year.

I sat on the garage floor a long time. Then I called his brother Walt in Visalia and read it to him over the phone and he laughed and laughed, and then he wasn't laughing, and neither was I.

Tuesday night McGwire hit his sixty-second home run. Roger would have been on the phone to Walt before the ball came down. Walt said, "I picked up the phone to call him, Ellen. I had the receiver in my hand."

Monday, August 17, 1998

Yosemite Valley. I left Fresno at five this morning and was at the Happy Isles trailhead by a little after eight. I walked the Mist Trail up past Vernal Fall to the top of Nevada Fall and came back down the other way.

The Mist Trail is stone steps, all wet, and people in sandals. Vernal Fall threw water sideways at me and I was soaked to the waist. At the top of Nevada Fall I ate a peanut butter sandwich on a warm rock and watched the whole river go over the edge. My knees are speaking to me tonight.

At the start, at Happy Isles, there is a sign with mileages on it. Vernal Fall. Nevada Fall. Half Dome. And farther down, Mount Whitney. I stood there and read that sign like a grocery list and something in me sat up.

I didn't write that down this morning. I'm writing it down now.

Saturday, July 18, 1998

My first real hike. I drove up to Sequoia by myself, which in thirty-four years of marriage I don't believe I ever did. Roger drove. I took the curves at twenty miles an hour with a pickup on my bumper and I did not care.

The trail to Tokopah Falls starts at Lodgepole and follows the river up a canyon for a couple of miles. It is an easy trail. Children do it. I did it with a daypack, two sandwiches, a water bottle and his red bandana around my neck. Marmots on the rocks, fat as housecats and not the least bit afraid of me. At the end the falls come down a granite cliff in pieces.

A family from Los Angeles asked me to take their picture, and then the mother asked if I wanted mine, and I said no thank you, I'm by myself. She said, "Good for you." It is a thing people say. It still helped.

It was 104 in Fresno when I got home. Up there I had been cold.

Sunday, June 21, 1998

Yesterday would have been thirty-four years. We were married June 20, 1964, a Saturday, at five in the afternoon in my mother's church in Kingsburg. It was 98 degrees and Roger's collar wilted before the vows.

I didn't go to the cemetery. I went to Woodward Park at six in the morning, before the heat, and walked the long loop by the river three times. Six miles, I think. The geese chase the joggers. An old man fishing off the bank said good morning to me all three times, like it was new every time.

Then I came home and sat in the car in the driveway for twenty minutes because I couldn't make myself go in.

The heat is here. 101 on Friday. I walk at six or I don't walk.

Friday, May 15, 1998

The last Seinfeld was last night. Roger taped every one of them, the tapes are on the shelf in the den with his labels on them. I watched it alone. I didn't laugh once for half an hour and then I laughed at the wrong part, loud, by myself, and scared the cat next door off the fence.

This morning the radio said Sinatra died. Roger sang "Summer Wind" in the car for thirty-four years and never once hit the note.

Monday, May 11, 1998

I have been walking at night.

I can't sleep past three. For a while I lay there and listened to the house, which is the worst thing you can do. Two weeks ago I got up and put on my shoes and his windbreaker over my nightgown and walked around the block. Nobody saw. Or somebody did and was kind enough not to mention it.

Every night a little farther. Now I go at a quarter to five, when the sprinklers come on and the newspaper lady comes through in her station wagon. I walk out to the canal and back. Roger's district ran that canal. He used to tell me what the water was doing like it was a person: "She's high today." "She's down." This morning she was high and fast and brown and I stood on the bank and said good morning to her out loud, God help me.

Mother's Day yesterday. Meredith brought the children down and Paul sent tulips. I was all right until the tulips.

Saturday, May 2, 1998

His clothes are still in the closet. His side. The flannel shirts in a row, the good suit, the golf shirt with the ketchup stain he said would come out. His shoes lined up on the floor like they're waiting to be stepped into.

This morning I opened the closet to get my own blouse and it smelled like him. Not cologne. Him. Coffee and Old Spice and the back of his neck. I stood there with my hand on the door until my arm got tired.

Meredith has offered twice to come down and "do the closet" for me. She means well. She'd have it folded and in bags for the church in an hour. I said not yet. I don't know what "yet" means. I shut the door. I'll wear the same two blouses for a while. Nobody is looking.

Thursday, April 23, 1998

Things the house does now that I never heard before.

The refrigerator hums and then stops, and the stopping is louder than the humming. The thermostat clicks at six in the morning because he set it to click at six in the morning. The ice maker drops ice into the bin in the middle of the night like someone setting down a glass.

His recliner has the shape of him in it. I sit on the couch.

The mail still comes for him. A seed catalog. A letter from the irrigation district about his pension, addressed to him, as if he could answer it. Something from the Elks. I've started a pile on the counter and the pile is getting tall. When it falls over I'll deal with it.

Irma brought over a casserole, the fourth one. I've been giving them to the young couple on the corner with the twins. They think I'm a very generous neighbor.

Sunday, April 19, 1998

My name is Ellen Vickery. I am fifty-five years old and I live in Fresno, California, in the same house for twenty-six years. My husband Roger died on Tuesday, February 10, of a heart attack, at the kitchen table, early in the morning, with the newspaper open to the weather. He was fifty-eight. He had been retired from the irrigation district for eight months.

Our son Paul set this page up for me when he was down for Easter. He works with computers in San Jose and he says lots of people keep a diary on the Internet now. I said who on earth would read it. He said that's not really the point, Mom.

The point is that the woman who runs the grief group at the hospice office on Tuesday nights says to write it down. Every week she says it. She says it doesn't have to be good, it just has to be out of you and onto something. I tried a spiral notebook. I kept tearing the pages out. On this I can't tear anything out. It just sits here.

So. It's been ten weeks. I am not doing well, and I am doing fine, and both are true, sometimes in the same hour. We have a daughter, Meredith, in Sacramento with her husband Phil and two little ones. We have Paul. I have a neighbor across the street, Irma, who is looking in on me more than I let on I notice.

That's enough for the first time.

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Last updated September 26, 1999