People go and seasons change

        I have not been over to Tank and Tummy the last few days as it will be all different now.

        Marty's little 14 foot trailer out in the country, next to his big house that needs a lot of work, is now empty for good.  Marty passed away more than a week ago and about two weeks after his operation.  We were told the operation went well and he recovered fast, but he remained at the hospital and had turned down chemo.

     He always said when a cancer gets operated on it then spreads like fire. That is how it happened with his late wife. And that is how his played out.  He had been debating not to have the operation and just have a longer life.

      Marty was always at T and T convenience store and takeout, as it was his living room.  Last summer I spent several afternoons with him sitting in the lone little booth outside the front window.  And we would watch the world go by and chat with the occasional tourist who dropped in for gas.  We would admire their Cam Am. Though the first time one pulled in Marty said do you see that, and I said yes, referring to the shapely gal who got off the bitch seat.  But Marty had been referring to the tri-wheel bike.

      We would talk to the tourists, ask where they were from and where going as they refueled their vehicle and went in to refuel themselves or empty themselves.  We would congratulate the bow hunters hauling their trophy heads home in the trailer behind their SUV.

       He would usually go home to his trailer the hottest part of the day and sit in front of a fan and rest
to come back around dusk to take up the evening conversation.  If I stopped by at T and T, he would
usually be there, at least one person to anchor the visit and talk.  Craig and old Charley are buddied
up and often drive out to the Keller district to look for deer. Don comes by mid afternoon and then
usually leaves, especially when Marty or Jerry would show up. Jerry comes infrequently and erratically
because he has his cow chores.  In any event, the past months he has been talking about a growing
operation with Tony, in response to Colorado's new recreational smoking law.  But I think Jerry is just kidding while I think Tony is more serious.

       Over the past winter though there were times when all of us would  hung together and have  nice conversation...but now the same stories are being told...and so nothing lasts for ever and seasons come and seasons go and the locals too need to have the outsiders turn over  so they can have new outsiders for amusement as that is the only change they have in their lives.  the ones who come and go while they stay.

       So I suppose I will just spend more evenings here at home, as I did today.  I put on a Coast to Coast show to listen to as I made dinner - I would rather eat my dinners in a timely manner anyway rather than go
visit til 7:30 or 8 and then come home and eat late.  I can see my life unwinding here as the universe
nudges me on to be somewhere else, anywhere else.  That is a trait of the Scotch Irish.  We tend to
move around a lot.  Restless.

      And even though a tourist might think the prairie is all the same. It isn't.  And it is.

      A few years ago I was in the Bureau of Reclamation Office at John Martin Reservoir and I stopped to admire the prairie view outside a window.  A federal employee said I had obviously been here a while. I asked how he knew and he said new comers see the land as flat and do not notice the little undulations and rises that give a piece of the prairie its own unique view. This particular view had a nice low bluff in the middle ground.  Not the Tetons, but something to admire when there is little to admire.

     Each little village in the prairie has its own collection of local characters and eccentrics.  In these parts, Marty was one of them.

    In the end, when he retired, he could not afford the utilities in the home he had raised his family in.  So he hooked up power to the small travel trailer, the same one he had drug up to the campgrounds west of Trinidad a few summers ago when he worked up there to escape the summer heat and earn a few summer dollars as a campground attendant.

     I never saw the inside of it, but someone who had said it was pretty small, with hardly room to turn around in it.  But that was Marty's home.  He lived in it during the scorching heat of summer and during the freezing cold of the prairie winters.

     He had a small fridge and I guess a stove burner, and a radio. He would listen to Texas radio stations all night and the next day would have a new set of knowledge about Texas events, and national events, with a Texas viewpoint.

     I suggested he get a small TV so he could watch games but he said he did not have a ledge big enough to put one on.

    One might call this a Spartan life, but it did not seem so to Marty.  And in the last election he was as ardent a Mitt Romney supporter as anyone. He truly identified with the rugged individualism of the super rich who put so many out of jobs to pocket their wages as asset rejiggering profits.

    Marty was devastated when Mitt lost.  More devastated at having to pay me off three small coffee bets because 'Bama had won, the Dems had retained the Senate, and gained ground in the House.  He did not speak to me for several weeks after that except to rail at me and 'Bama and our treachery.

    As I calmly explained, the presidential contest had been between two shades of darkness, with 'Bama the paler shade, which is why I had signed on with him.

    It was a few weeks after that, about the time he made his annual visit up north to visit a stepson and stay in a real nice house for a few weeks, that Marty started to have pain in his side.

     He thought it was a reaction to him taking too much medication for a stomach ache.  But in the end it turned out to be much worse than that.

    Another one of the prairie characters has moved on, changing into a ghost that now blows along with the breeze, causing ripples of waves in the tall grass, as it moves along.