Last fall I mourned the last

letter ever from my penpal who'd gone blind, quite suddenly, at age 81. It was one more milestone, one more stage of life gone, another loved one leaving this world.

When I called her on Thanksgiving, she sounded so weak, so weary, and so ready to die, I cried for an hour. And I never cry. At least, I never used to. The past couple months, a lot happened, and this new little crack in the sturdy old dam is widening. But never mind that. Losing Lois had me so rattled, all I could do was write a short story, Ashes and Acorns, inspired by her wish to be cremated and scattered over the Grand Canyon.

Lois was my mom's cousin, high school classmate, bridesmaid, and penpal from 1955-2017. These are their great-grandparents:

When I first met Lois in 1974, she and her husband and five children lived in a trailer in the Arizona desert. They had rodeo horses, a pet tarantula, and every Zane Grey book ever published. She took all five kids camping and taught them to shoot. (Bear gun bullets are really, really big. And impressive.) Horses and guns, in Zane Grey country. I wanted to run away from home and live with these crazy, rugged, distant cousins. I wrote her a few times but knew I'd never go there, never get her to adopt me. There was no room in that little trailer with a family of seven for a runaway farmgirl who longed for the desert and cowboys and maybe a big black stallion too.

Years passed. Her five moved on, and she barely saw them, or her grandchildren. She started writing and mailing letters to an average of three people a day, or ten a week, or some crazy number of postage stamps and Leaning Tree cards, none of which she could afford, with all the stray animals she adopted and fed, and living on a widow's meager Social Security checks.

Her handwriting was almost illegible even in her best days. It's as inscrutable as Hebrew or Japanese to the offspring, who did learn cursive 20-some years ago, but reading it is something else.

Yes.
Lois snapped that picture herself. With wildfire raging toward her, and her horses. Somehow they were spared. Maybe those Biblical pillars of smoke and doom were farther away than they appear in the photo. Lois may be under five feet tall, but she'd sass a tornado and tell it to back off. Her only daughter, just as petite and little, drives a big rig. From rodeo queen to long-distance trucker. Four-plus generations after an Irish immigrant married an Algonquin woman in 1800, the legacy of darkly brooding, irascible, tough, plucky, Usher/Native American blood is undiluted.

She is blunt and outspoken. When I found a bookfinder.com copy of my most treasured novel and mailed it to her, she hated it so much, she mailed it back. It never arrived. Lost in the mail, a rare and beloved 1950s Cinderella meets Butch Cassidy story set in the Old West. When I mentioned baptisms or weddings, she'd say how much she hates Catholicism and refused to convert for her husband, which irked him til the day he finally kicked the bucket. I was never offended. And she'd have been surprised if I was. Lois had mastered that Buddhist concept of detachment. And I had married into Catholicism, and was a closet agnostic anyway.

With a spinster aunt (my dad's only sister) a hermit, a recluse, and an impassioned orator on the latest terrible thing she's read in the newspaper, I had learned from infancy that women could speak out like that and we would still love them. We were taught by example to shrug off the ravings of wild Germanic women. Sadly, the rest of the world had not been taught this lesson. Many decades after leaving home, I continue to try to unlearn it. "Be yourself" is the biggest lie ever fed to us. "Be open and honest" is also nothing but an invitation to the circling of the wolves.

After so many years, I turned into a recluse too, like Lois, like my spinster aunt, who I continue to miss as dearly as if she were a doting, loving, indulgent aunt like the ones you see on TV.

The offspring never understood why I read and responded to the chicken scratching of some recluse living in a metal trailer in the Arizona desert. They laughed when I'd read out loud for them some of her letters. E.g., October 2017,

I just had Anna the poodle groomed.

It's State Fair time! But I'm not going.

Got an apple pie in the oven. But I'll get this diabetes under control.

It's getting cooler. Got to call the propane truck out. Bills, bills, bills!

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But she also commented on whatever is in the news, so her letters are little missives of history:

Wasn't that awful about Las Vegas! Lots of good people helping others. So many died. It's just unbelievable the horror stories.

In July,

Hi! I heard there's a monsoon storm heading into this area. We need rain desperately after the wildfire from last week.

I didn't know you were interested in astronomy too!

There is so much more to say about her, and what these weird letters from a distant cousin really meant, and how it was like losing my own mom when Lois said this was the end: she had gone blind, and she was dying.

And yet, she is still here.

And today, I got something I never expected to see again: a letter in the mail, handwritten by Lois. A valentine, on Ash Wednesday. How often does Valentine's Day occur on this epic day of fasting and abstinence, the launching of Lent, the season of introspection and repentance? The priest, at noon Mass, likened it to a colonoscopy of the soul. Way to make me dread Lent more than ever.

But then--as if to assure me that Resurrections don't happen only at Easter--that letter from Lois arrived. She had written it only a few days ago, and the words are all over the map, but I can read them. It feels like a miracle--a gift from heaven--and I am still smiling.

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News Flash

Another mass shooting at a high school, with casualties, the same day I'm typing about distant cousins who were "loaded for bear" - a phrase I wouldn't have understood on first hearing, if not for seeing a massive bullet dangling from a cousin's keychain. (I'm not even sure if they're called bullets or slugs.) I have no desire to go into the wilderness looking for bears to shoot. Or elk. Or any creature. But my cousins were cowboys, unlike any of the farm boys back home in the Midwest, and I was mesmerized.

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art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics