Christmas morning. A feast had been prepared by the internet volunteers (a pair of sunburnt British girls and Garrison, a nineteen-year-old Sigma Chi freshly dropped out of UNC Chapel Hill) under the supervision of Carlotta’s niece, Mari, a recovering addict with Jesse eyes and six months sober. Over a perfectly sludgy pour-over I gathered that Mari had been a contractor in another life. She was the only one at Villa with any building expertise, but that wasn’t why she was here. Her habit had almost cost them the family business. Digging holes at Villa Anita was part atonement, part ersatz rehab.
Lise was antsy, in no way down for coffee, breakfast, a spiked nog or two, watching the family (Family?) open their presents, learning more about the cane grass and tamarisk overtaking Villa’s early sculptures. Improving them, Erin insisted, emphatically and at length. Finally, sopping with nog and mimosa and stuffed French toast and sausage and orange chocolate from someone’s stocking, I followed my sister down the hill to the Tecopa house.
Once, our dogs found a rattlesnake in the garden here. My dad cut the snake’s head off with a shovel then brought us out to see. Lise was crawling. She was as curious then as Ruth is now. She took the dead snake in her hand. I’ve heard the story so many times I’d swear the memory was my own. She took the severed end into her mouth and began to suck.
Where our house once was, only a stone chimney rose from a pile of rubble, rat shit and trash. Shredded insulation and shattered glass. Much had been stolen or scavenged, yet strange dioramas sat preserved. The spice rack. A box of warped records, a box of crumbling books and magazines. Stunning rocks everywhere. Lise and I trudged through the debris awhile in silence, risking exposure to hantavirus to gather the special ones.
I wanted to say: You and I have loved each other and her and been loved by each other and by her, them, in all these houses, through all these memories which were once moments, real and felt even if forgotten. We have loved and loved and been loved despite the fissures and losses, violence, cruelty, smallness, deficits in money and time and attention, despite the betrayals and indifferences, the distance and weather, despite developing different definitions of certain words. Death, expensive, cold. How? I wondered. Because the skinny twin was kind, pliant with forgiveness. Because she absorbed the fat one’s failings, made them her grace. I thought, There was not enough to go around. Such a handy phrase to describe such mean circumstances. Here came another: I was born at a good time.
We made no ceremony, had no ritual. I stepped on a sheet of corrugated tin that had once been a wall of the darkroom and a rattlesnake went berserk underneath. Lise and I screamed and scrambled up the far ridge with our rocks.
Catching my breath, I said, “I think I’m gonna stay here.”
She tossed a tired glance down at the trash heap that had been our first home. “And do what?”
“Bear witness?” I said. “Grieve?” In truth I was thinking of Mari, the little orb I already felt athrob between us.
Lise shrugged. “I guess that’s what this place is for.”
After a time, I told her, “I saw the redwoods.”
“With what’s-his-face?” she said, squinting into the canyon. “Were they huge?”
“So huge. They grow in a circle.”
“What circle?”
“The big ones shoot up babies all around, from their roots I guess, and then when the big one dies—gets killed, in the redwood’s case, cut down for extractive—”
“Keep it moving.”
“Right. When it dies all its family is there, circled around the empty space. Grieving in a circle. The parent tree, it’s called.”
Lise said, “Too much.”
“We put our tent right in there. Me and what’s-his-face. I thought it would feel cozy but to be honest I felt kinda trapped. I kept thinking how they’re stuck there, the redwoods.”
“They’re stuck there,” Lise said. “But we’re not.” She gathered her specimens to herself and stood up, as if to illustrate. “Your shit does not scan.” She set off down the ridge.
“Where are you going?” I called out after her.
“Home,” she called back. It took me a moment to grasp that she used this word to mean Las Vegas. “I have to get G-ma her truck back and I have to go to work. I don’t want to live here anymore.”
She walked up the hill past Villa Anita to the truck still decorated with stars and stripes G-ma had painted on there after 9/11, and drove away. Though it was midday, a crown of coyotes appeared on the opposite ridge. Together, we watched her go.
That night I heard them howling. I got up to record them and discovered I’d left my phone in the truck. I lay in the bottle cottage and listened. At first I’d mistaken the howling for sirens. I remembered how many times in how many cities I had heard sirens and wished them coyotes. The yipping howls became sobs. They really were sobs, I realized, and very near, not coyotes or sirens but a woman crying close by. She might have been sitting with her back to the bottle cottage, thinking she was alone.
It was Mari.
The next day after breakfast, Garrison introduced me to a bong he kept hidden in a work boot in his trailer. He’d built it out of a water bottle, a lug nut and an empty tennis ball canister. He was a natural teacher, offering extensive instructions for the device’s care and use, with demonstrations. “Technically it’s a gravity bong,” he said. “You can call it a gravity bong but we”—Garrison spoke in the first-person plural a lot, like he had a few of his Sigma Chi brothers rolling with him at all times—“we just call it the geeb.”
“The geeb,” I coughed, having cleared it.
Garrison nodded in admiration. There was some worry on his face, too. Perhaps he was reckoning with the fact that I was someone’s mother. Maybe I was imagining that.
Just then the softest knock came at the trailer door. Mari. Garrison silently offered her the geeb and Mari silently obliged, an oft and intimate ritual, I could tell. I revised: Mari was Garrison’s we. And now, thanks to the life-changing magic of cannabinoids, we three were the we. Together we took to hitting the geeb before and after breakfast, working all day digging holes for we knew not what or sorting junk for Erin’s sculptures, then soaking at sunset. At night we’d hit the geeb once more before bed at a picnic table on the back forty before Garrison inevitably drifted off in the direction of the Brits, leaving Mari and me alone.
Mostly Mari and I talked about Villa Anita. It was like living in a very big fort, we decided, playful, ecstatic, chaotic, mysterious to me still. Where the Watkins ranch was open to the desert, fenceless, embracing the canyon, Villa Anita was fortified against it. Inside, Villa (as the volunteers called it) was a bonkers honeycomb of paths and secret rooms. Actually, a word like rooms was not especially useful here, given how difficult it was to tell if you were indoors or out. Someone somewhere had a lot of money. Priceless oriental rugs lay atop ripped-up casino carpet lay atop dirt. The bathroom I used had a poor man’s Chihuly skylight and a gravel floor, its walls a collage of tarp, billboard panels, beer bottles and cane grass, which Erin called the new adobe. I said cane grass was an invasive. J said there was no such thing as an invasive and if there were we’d be one and I should try not to garden like a fascist.
The place felt exuberant and illicit, like a brothel in a ghost town. Nothing was where I expected it to be, especially not light switches, doors, floors and doorknobs. It slowed me down, made me a beginner again. Reaching, I discovered architectural orthodoxies deep in my muscles, felt how often my body honored someone else’s code. I regretted spending so much of my life in buildings designed by banks. Sometimes it felt like being in the built-out imagination of my most alive self, and sometimes honestly it felt a lot like a cult. Carlotta made me cry a bunch. Sometimes I was naked a long while before I realized it was no longer the time to be naked, that naked time had come and gone. Needless to say, I was high the entire time.
There was no such thing as trash at Villa Anita. The family had not thrown trash in the county dumpster for more than twelve years. Erin and Mari showed me how they insulated the trailers and cottages with plastic, Styrofoam and other eternal materials. I felt my standard objections start to flare—ants, cancer—and then fade away. They didn’t make sense here. Erin taught me to make adobe bricks and bottle walls. J taught me to heal stressed plants with my root chakra. A visiting shaman named Skandar did a crystal sweep and got my levels right.
Two other important rules at Villa Anita: objects were sentient, and there was no such thing as being lost. Garrison, who had lived in Villa for nine months, discovered a chamber he’d never been in before, its walls made of mattress coils and car parts turned into planters now poking up cactus. If you put something down it might run away from home to be part of the art. This happened with Mari’s things a lot. But she’d come into things as well. The universe provided. For example, her park ranger boyfriend had found some mushrooms while picking up trash at a backcountry site and Mari was safekeeping them. “Psychedelics tend to find me when I need them,” she said, sending a rush of blood to my vulva.
I told her Foucault did psychedelics in Death Valley. “His trip had a big impact on his thinking.”
No wildflowers this year, Mari said her boyfriend said. No rain. I said I missed the smell. It came from creosote, she said her boyfriend said. Creosote is ancient, I said. Creosote survived the nuclear blasts, she said her boyfriend said. I said none of us survived the nuclear blasts, that her boyfriend sounded like a dud, that we should eat his mushrooms at the hot springs without him.
At the hot springs Mari said she missed pills. I got very DARE, did my Sackler rant about growing up in the blast zone. I said, “My mom died from that shit.”
She said, “For real?”
“So that’s how that ends. If you’re wondering.”
“Wise words from someone who’s been clearing the geeb on the regular.” She floated on her back, nipples rising to the sky. “Anyway, that’s how all this ends, isn’t it?”
“It’s different when you choose it. You leave all these people behind on purpose, you reject them, abandon them, then they’re stuck here, alone. It’s the worst kind of loneliness.”
“Shit is selfish,” she admitted.
“And you can’t know how final it is. It’s like I think on some level, in some warped way, I thought they would be out here. Down there.” In the water, I guess I meant. “But they’re not. She is never anywhere. They never say what I need them to say.”
“I think the worst kind of loneliness isn’t when you’re alone but when you’re with the wrong person.” She raised the joint pinched in her fingers—rolled of fluffy dank buds Garrison had procured from the Timbisha dispensary. “All that was in another life. I’m clean now. No hard stuff, no pills, no needles. Just mushrooms, flower, water and sky.”
I floated beside her, watched the stars overhead. Grateful. Wantless, I promise. I wanted only my baby, and if not her then for the waters to urge me to Mari, and for Mari to please please please touch me.
About a hundred people lived in Tecopa, and every one of them, it seemed, took the waters at sunset, whether at the public baths, the private baths, or the wild springs Mari and I preferred. There was no cell service in Tecopa, and I never heard anyone wishing there were. Spaces without cell service were like wildlife refuges for idiosyncratic thoughts, I opined stonedly as we rode bikes past the public baths to where a sun-cracked sign began, “These ancient hills . . .”
We picked our way along the path to where the water rose from the rock, hot and healing. Mari said, “The path is not the route to the springs but a part of the springs.”
Ideal soaking began before sunset and continued into nightfall, obeying no clock but the sky. Wind rippled through the marsh grass and blew steam from the water. We dropped our clothes in the dirt.
“Hot springs can cause abortion and are thought to have served this function in the past,” Mari said.
“Also in the present,” I added.
I watched her big black bush surface toward purple mountains ancient and indifferent. I floated on my back, felt my nipples harden against the wind.
She taught me where the vents were, that they always moved, to feel to find them. I did, pressing my feet to the hottest rocks I could bear. I thought about how rarely we let pleasure lead the way. For most of my life it seemed my body had been molded by various structures—tight waistbands, bras, foot-binding high heels. How often had I invited—paid for—some wire to dig into me, and for what? If it was buoyancy I was after, all I had to do was come to the hot springs and float free, for once, and do it daily. I let myself be held by the fossil water.
Mari pulled my hand into a hole. She pressed my fingers and hers into the silky mud there. It frightened me a little. She instructed me to pull up a fistful of it. Gently, Mari and I smeared the green-gray mud on each other’s faces.
It seemed essential to become accustomed to drift. It seemed the wild springs were an inoculation against the oppressive beauty standards of patriarchy. Maybe they were practice for death. I know that in the water we were the opposite of deathless. We floated naked and vulnerable as manatees. Our skin tautened as the mud dried. My mother had put it on our dogs’ noses when they were bitten by snakes. My father had hoped it might cure his cancer. I have a photo of him slathered with it, cross-legged on a blanket in the sun, waiting. I wanted a God like that, some way of knowing this place that evaded the internet, the park rangers, the anthologists, a wordless knowledge. The feeling would be intense, Mari warned. “It’s the empathic extraction of any number of invisible venoms.”
A long, long time ago, I said, all of this was Lake Tecopa. Then Lake Tecopa leaked through the canyon and into Lake Manly, which we now call Death Valley. A story my mother had told me many times. With the help of the park ranger’s psilocybin, long-gone memories returned to me. “They taught me to swim here.” I remembered stretching my whole body toward them, my parents. I saw the stars and felt their hands beneath me. From the bottom of a vanished inland sea, nothingness tightened in me. A sensation of sublime insignificance, of almost orgasmic loss. Fellow bathers came and went. They whispered, gossiped, stroked each other in secret.
In a secluded eddy I asked Mari, “Do you feel that?”
She said she did.
I said, “We should probably kiss.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I just couldn’t.”
Then we did.
When exiting the wild springs, I took care to observe not merely the ecstatic cold, but that this ecstasy lived at the intersection of the wind and my own perfect, dying body. I practiced not wanting more but my teeth always did.
On Sundays monks came down from the mountains. They draped their saffron robes on the reeds around the wild springs and played their radio too loud. It seemed there was a place for me.
Though the inevitable deterioration was mild in the wider genre of utopia-to-dystopia implosions, the scene at Villa Anita went south almost overnight. Carlotta and Erin asked me to pay them Airbnb prices for the nights I’d been in the bottle cottage—an extraordinary fee to which I agreed, occasioning another email from Theo re: $.
Soon after, Mari and I returned from the wild springs on a windless day, itching mud mite bites at our ankles, and discovered a Park Service truck parked outside the compound. At the gate was a paper bag filled with my belongings.
Mari went inside and came out a long while later with her eyes red and puffy. The park ranger had read her diary. Carlotta had deemed me “volatile” and “insecure,” bad for Mari’s recovery and a bad mom.
I said, “The owner of fifteen dogs says I’m a bad mom.”
Mari apologized. “She says you gotta go.”
“Go where?”
She considered, said hold on, went back into the compound and after a long while returned with a sleeping bag, a tent, two gallons of water and a box of granola bars.
“I’d get a stick,” she said while locking the gate. “For the coyotes.”
“What stick? There are no trees, Mari!” But she was already gone.
I found a length of rusted metal pipe and considered vandalizing the park ranger’s truck.
It was February, freezing and dark, the waxing crescent moon behind rare clouds. I wasn’t going to hitchhike to Vegas—that’s no solution to any problem ever. So, feeling brave and white and territorial from my wounding, some latent Libertarianism in me perhaps inflamed from being jilted by a federal employee, I walked down Stampmill Road in the dark. There, I layered on all my dry clothes and pitched my tent under the salt cedars near the trash heap I still thought of as the Tecopa house. In the dog-smelling tent I took an inventory: Uggs, Caruthers, toothbrush and toothpaste I’d bought from the gas station in Shoshone, my wallet, granola bars, jugs of water, keys to I didn’t even know what anymore. I arranged these beside the sleeping bag and hung my towel, still damp from the wild springs, on a branch of salt cedar.
The coyotes went berserk that night. I lay awake listening to them yipping closer and closer, clutched my pipe in my sleeping bag as they sniffed around the tent.
I woke well before dawn and while I did not remember sleeping I knew I’d had a bad dream about childbirth. Pain ran through me, as if from the teeth inside. I wondered where their roots went. My water jugs had frozen solid. I held one to my pubis, quaking, waiting. When the sun finally came up, I said, “Thank you.” As in for another day on this rock.
I walked the canyon, saying aloud every nightmare thought I’d stuffed down inside me back in civilization. I let everything that was wrong with me bounce off the canyon walls. Me and others. I ranted at Mari for not wanting me, at Noah for not being there beside me. I conjured him a new girlfriend, younger, brilliant, without child. She only made me want him more, want him so bad he appeared as my thoughts in his voice saying J curve, saying tamarisk. If only Noah would walk beside me in the date grove at China Ranch, or swim with me at dusk in the Shoshone pool with bats swooping overhead, he’d see plainly that he loved me back.
I tried summoning the beloveds: Noah, Ruth, Theo, Lise, anyone. I had no phone so I used the old ways. I regretted not loving Theo better, said so in the canyon. I apologized to him and to Ruth for the ways I had “prepared” for her, that is, by buying shit. I apologized for the care and grief and attention I poured into various pieces of plastic, the deliberation I had taken in their purchase, the grotesquery of this agreed-upon ritual, what a doofus I’d been for doing that as a way of getting ready to receive her when all along I should have been doing this.
I was doing the best I could with what I had. Or was I?
Days got warm fast. I spent the hot part of the day in the tent, reading, crying, masturbating, napping. My favorite chapter of Caruthers was, predictably, chapter thirteen, “Sex in Death Valley Country.” It began, “Sex, of course, went with the white man to the desert . . .” Here I learned how my trailer school came to be.
Once Shoshone faced the desperate need of a school. There were only three children of school age in the little settlement and the nearest school was 28 miles away. Parents complained, but authorities at the county seat nearly 200 miles away, pointed out that the law required 13 children or an average attendance of five and a half to form a school district.
Like other community problems it was taken to Charlie, though none believed that even Charlie could solve it.
The time for the opening of schools was but a few weeks away when one day Brown headed his car out into the desert. “Hunting trip,” he explained.
In a hovel he found Rosie, a Piute squaw with a brood of children.
Rosie’s children were five, six, seven and eight. “Rosie was a challenging problem,” wrote Caruthers:
She would have taken no beauty prize among the Piutes, but when along her desert trails she acquired these children of assorted parentage, Fate dealt her an ace.
With the few dollars Rosie wangled from the several fathers for the support of their children, she lived unworried. She liked to get drunk and the only nettling problem in her life was the federal law against selling liquor to Indians. So she established her own medium of exchange—a bottle of liquor. Unfortunately she spread a social disease and that was something to worry about.
“Rosie has Shoshone over a barrel,” Joe Ryan said. “If we run her out, we won’t have enough children for school.”
Then there was the economic angle—the loss of wages by afflicted miners and mines crippled by the absence of the unafflicted who would take time off to go to Las Vegas for the commodity supplied by Rosie.
Charlie arranged for Ann Cowboy to look after Rosie’s children and called up W. H. Brown, deputy sheriff at Death Valley Junction and told him to come for Rosie. Brownie, as he is known all over the desert, came and took Rosie into custody. “What’ll I charge her with?”
“She has a venereal disease,” Charlie said.
“There’s no law I know of against that. . . .”
“All right. Charge her with pollution. She got drunk and fell into the spring.” Then Charlie called up the Judge and suggested Rosie have a year’s vacation in the county jail.
The paths that radiated from Rosie’s shack in the brush like spokes from the hub of a wheel, were soon overgrown with salt grass. She served her sentence and returned to Shoshone and the paths were soon beaten smooth again.
Eventually Brown declared Shoshone out of bounds for Rosie and she moved over into Nevada. There she found a lover of her tribe and one night when both were drunk, Rosie decided she’d had enough of him and with a big, sharp knife she calmly disemboweled him—for which unladylike incident she was removed to a Nevada prison where the state cured her syphilis and turned her loose—if not morally reformed, then at least physically fit.
That’s all Caruthers has to say about Rosie, except that one of her “patrons,” a known “total abstainer,” left her $50 in his will “to buy whiskey.”
I walked to China Ranch for food and to the wild springs for wanting—wanting Mari, wanting Noah, wanting Ruth, wanting to know what I wanted and why and wanting it now. Instead I got aspiring influencers from LA or, often, a grisly, undertoothed local soaker with a pet wolf named Osiris. Osiris’s dad worked for the Nature Conservancy. In one of his unwelcome history lessons he informed me that what I called the wild springs was in fact a trough scraped into the marsh by a backhoe hired by a pharmaceutical company in the eighties. I was half listening. When eventually it became clear that he needed something from me and perhaps that something was my name, I admitted it to be Ann Cowboy.
“A real pleasure to meet you, Ms. Cowboy,” he said, gifting me one of the bikes racked on the back of his van. It was a bad fit for me, one of those absurd adult tricycles, but it had invincible tires and seemed it would carry me as far as the Timbisha dispensary in Amargosa Junction and back.
It was hellishly hot the first time I set out for the dispensary, so hot Mari’s park ranger gave me a ride. It was pushing a hundred and ten or I wouldn’t even have accepted. The ranger, A. Adams his name tag said, tossed my trike in the back of his truck before he realized who I was. We rode in silence until I said, “Here,” indicating the dispensary, a shipping container set in a gravel lot before three rows of Quonset huts ringed by razor wire.
A. Adams sighed and pulled over. “They promised the Parks they wouldn’t do this.”
“Oh? Did those mean Indians break a promise with the U.S. government?” I got out and slammed the door behind me. A. Adams pulled away, both of us forgetting my trike in the back until I ran out to the highway and waved him down. When he circled back I tried mightily to get the tailgate down and then once it was down I wrestled with the trike for an eternity before finally climbing up into the truck bed and body-slamming the trike to the ground. I stumbled down, slammed the tailgate closed, and when it fell open I slammed it again.
The dispensary had a total of two strains, an indica and a sativa. The prices were astronomical. Veganic, the signage boasted.
“Vegan, organic and humanely farmed,” said the Native guy behind the counter. He was huge, wore a headband and a flamboyantly tie-dyed sweatshirt (sweatshirt!) reading may the hózhó be with you. “Shade-grown here on-site.”
“Shade-grown? In the Quonset huts?”
“That’s right,” he said, “in the shade of the Quonset huts. We even have fans in there to simulate the wind.”
He rang me up. “Cash only.” When I griped that the ATM fee was extortion, he stared at me in serene silence that I took to mean, Reparations, Karen.
If my parents could see me now! I thought, smoking weed on the side of the highway at the entrance to Death Valley National Park on marathon day. What pioneers those old hippies had been! I gave thanks to all the rappers who marched for my freedom to enjoy a blunt in the shade of a salt cedar and behold the spectacle of the ultramarathoner in all his palpable pathology, the pinnacle of Progress sitting on my trike unwashed, watching the runners with an inner monologue voiced by Jim Breuer: What are you running from, man?
I rediscovered my love for smoking in the desert. Being high was a delight, obviously, but I loved the physicality of smoking just as much, couldn’t get over the mundane magic of pinching a little fireball between my fingers. Smoking at my campsite, I felt as pure as an early human. Barely upright. I found I could commune with my mother by smoking. I felt her as kinetic memories rising in my gestures, her gestures if you replaced the Marlboro Lights with veganic prerolls.
I rode my trike to Shoshone, bought food and toilet paper and calling cards at the gas station, got drunk at the Crowbar. Sometimes before I got drunk I took a calling card into the pay phone in front of the bar, closed its accordion door for privacy and called one of my old therapists, the woman one. Sometimes, after therapy, if no one needed the pay phone, I called Lise. Together we tried to remember the first things that burned away before everything was on fire.
Sometimes I called Theo. “Where are you?” I always asked. “Living room,” he always said. Still I envisioned him at our dining table, hunched beneath his cross to bear. One time he said, “In the garden.”
“I miss my plants,” I said.
“Which ones?”
“The ferns. All my houseplants. The aloe. The lavender, the begonias. My little Japanese maple on the hill,” I said. “The black walnut.”
“Begonias are dead,” Theo told me. “Spiky pink things? Yeah, dead. Hydrangeas are dead. Houseplants, too.” As for the black walnut, he spent his summer evenings raking them where they dropped on the lawn, trying to scrape them up before they rotted into a tarry stain wormed with maggots. He said, “I won’t visit the black walnut in the tree zoo.”
Somewhere, an air horn farted. “Game day,” Theo said wearily. It was fall then, late where Theo was. I saw him raking black walnuts in the dim. It wouldn’t be dark there like it was dark here. There there were porch lights and streetlights and a string of café lights stretching across the backyard. Or there had been when I left, so many months ago. Surely Theo had winterized. During these conversations I frequently had to remind myself that while I was on my Oregon Trail, Theo had kept on existing.
“Where are you?” he asked, then answered. “The bar.”
“You should come out here,” I said. “If you’re done with trees.” Theo was silent, then said he had to go.
For a time, our story ended there. Theo in the garden, me in the desert.
A few days later I walked to the Tecopa post office. I wanted to stop living like a coyote. My phone was still gone and I didn’t miss it. There was no service and I didn’t want any. I sent Theo a postcard. This coyote has clawed her way back from the grave with my new address. About a week later I opened the P.O. box to a rockslide of forwarded mail. The volume was wrathful, included slips for several packages that turned out mostly to be books. I made space for these packages’ woeful carbon footprints, but truthfully, I’d never been so happy to see so many unsolicited galleys.
The only package that wasn’t a book was even better than a book. It was a shoebox full of letters. Theo had sent them, but before that my mother had. My mother had written the letters to her cousin Denise decades ago, when both of them were girls. Denise had sent them to me in Michigan months ago, after reading my clown motel novel. All of this I learned in a short letter from Denise to me taped inside the lid of the box, mostly apologies for not sending the letters sooner, and for not sorting them.
Yet I find the letters have been sorted. They’re in chronological order, the earliest, on personalized stationery reading mirth from martha, is dated April 1968. I do the math. My mother is ten.
Hello Dee,
Nothing happened today. A boy named Keith called me he didn’t say much. What’s going on up there? Do you think Nick still wants me? Nick is so handsome his belly button fell off! Do you see him often? I really miss everyone up there. Oh well, that’s beyond the point. I talk to you just like I talk to my friends.
My birthday was the 28th. Cynthia’s was the 21st. Chris and Kathy gave us a party on the 24th. It was a lot of fun. We played a game called Kiss, Slap, Hug. I can’t explain it, so I won’t.
Cynthia likes Kai Neilson. I like Brad Neilson. They are cousins. I kissed Brad. Cynthia kissed Kai. For my birthday I got this stationery some perfume, a ring, some other paper, two dollars & a new outfit. I have the books about pop music also. They’re good.
Say hi to whoever said hi to me. Also to everyone else. Got to go.
Flower power!
Black is beautiful!
White is wonderful!
Green is very groovy!
Watch out for Blue Meanies!
Bye,
Martha
P.S. Write back. Mirth means joy.