https://www.carvezine.com/print/fall2020

In Idaho, April cheats you. Melting snowcaps spike on the horizon and fill stream beds, while Alberta clippers fan down the state, reddening ears, cracking lips, numbing toes. Your friends in Texas report camping trips and water skiing. The geese feeding behind your house, braying through winter loneliness, have vanished in dagger formations. April is an in-between world, not perfectly cruel, but only hinting at the majesty of Idaho summer. Each morning begins a mystery, the hybrid of seasons: sunshine followed by sleet, fog, and then sweaty tropical heat. It’s as if every day has somewhere else to be.

*

I was 22 and helping care for my father. My mom, the professor, educated wannabe teachers at Boise State, her job two years old. I thought time in Idaho stretched out eternally. I had put undergraduate classes on hold back in Texas, left a job I loved in wilderness guiding, and U-hauled north with no definite plans of returning.

It was morning, and I had constructed for Dad his usual cinnamon toast, sliced banana, and hazelnutted coffee. Mom wheeled to work, and it was me and my hunchbacked father, staring at each other over the crusts on his plate. Maybe the TV was on. The windows in our Boise home faced east, and the morning rays waved inside. Because I would stay up all night in Boise, I sometimes saw us as intersecting trajectories, Dad beginning his day, me ending mine.

Dad moped, as he did often since his sports writing career imploded, his fingers unable to light across keys, his mind’s sentences broken into tangents. That day he said something like, “Well, son, what do you think I got to live for the rest of my life?” a philosophical conundrum he plied me with almost every morning. Perhaps because it was the forty-fifth or sixty-ninth time he’d asked, or that the bedrooms were full and I hadn’t again slept well because the couch was too short and the floor too cold, or maybe I was just tired, tired of my father, the depressing form he’d become, an existential exclamation mark I didn’t know how to have distance on. What I said was, “Well, Dad, there’s a part of me that wonders if you should die….”