Neck Silk Fading From Red

Cody will fall behind within the week. I could write that it will be hard, it will be hot, it will be painful and waste words for these things are all a given. There is no way to know when I will be at a table again, any table and not sitting cross legged in the desert dirt tempting ants and scorpions to run up my pant legs and pierce my legs. It all comes back in less than a mile of walking. The road takes up where it left off. In five miles I will look as if I have never rested. In five miles I will listen to my body tell me about all the little things I will never see again. I am at Vail's Stage Stop Horse Hotel and come to love Paul's company and endless history lessons he offers up about Cody and the surrounding region. We toss broken bails to his prize horses of perfect lineage, scoop oats into an old coffee can and feel the cool wake of morning put on two coats too many as the last of white status clouds melt into blue heat. In a half hour hay is sticking to our necks and I am thirteen years old loading a hay wagon that moves across the July fields in a creaking memory of Becket, Ma. All of my life has prepared me for this land, these people of the horse. Liz and Paul's place is an old stage stop where Wild Bill Cody rested, Chief Black Kettle stretched his legs and history thicker than all time painted every cut of earth with memory. I am going back to go forward. Always it is this way. I make pancakes on gravel stones always feeling that people from times gone by are watching, approvingly. If we are silent, and very still we can here the land speak, telling us where we belong, and where we don't. It is there when we arrive at a new place. It is silently speaking when we leave if it recognises our stance at the fire, and how we left the large black spider living by the door just as we found it.