She never pitched my shit out a window\u2014clothes, laptop, record player\u2014like breakups on TV. My wife. My ex. My tall, lanky, Janice. She didn\u2019t even yell at our end. She simply chose God over me, said she felt called to a life of poverty and service. She told me all of this on a Tuesday night, after driving home from the construction site, then pulled me in the bedroom and gave me every bit of her for the last time. Afterward, as we stared up at the hairline crack in our plaster ceiling, she asked for our savings, for me to file the paperwork she\u2019d signed and dated, and to drop her and her backpack off at the airport in the morning, to catch a nonstop to missionary school.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to blame God because I can\u2019t see or shake him. He seemed physical and present when Janice talked about him. I should\u2019ve been more concerned. I should\u2019ve stepped in after the evangelical solicitors knocked on our door. There\u2019d been a pit inside her that our marriage and careers and house couldn\u2019t fill. Kids or pets might\u2019ve done the trick, but she\u2019d been given faulty female parts and terrible allergies. I should\u2019ve taken time to snap signs together, like puzzle pieces, to get a clearer picture of where she was moving. She\u2019d slowly dwindled down her wardrobe until the walls and cedar planks of her closet took on more space than her clothes. She\u2019d turned down good promotions at the hospital, to keep her time and energy for bible studies and volunteering in shelters.<\/p>\n
I thought her faith was beautiful and simple, free from all the pressures I\u2019d known growing up Mormon. But I still wouldn\u2019t go to church with her. She never even asked. I\u2019d sworn off all religions in high school, then left home for Boise State, not Brigham-Young, like my seven older brothers and sisters. That\u2019s where we met, in an introduction to something class, and we decided to drop anchors in Boise after graduating and finding jobs and getting hitched, almost five years ago. They weren\u2019t bad years, either. When you thumb through our pictures on Instagram, it\u2019s easy to think they were the best years of our lives. We went out on dates. We laughed all the time. And we swallowed up Stephen King books, as well as the Hollywood adaptions (she favored his supernatural stories over the horror, go figure). I never bitched about the way she spent her time. I learned to fill bible study nights and Sundays working in the garage, dovetailing jewelry boxes and mitering picture frames\u2014the same ones I\u2019d first made for Janice\u2014for my Etsy store.<\/p>\n
Our house sold in a weekend, her Subaru wagon in a week. I tried to hang on to them for a time, along with my project-manager job, but they became hollow shells, like the pit in Janice\u2019s stomach. I\u2019ve read Boise\u2019s the fastest growing city in America right now, yet Janice and I left for the hills. Janice, for a mice-infested straw hut in Ecuador (that\u2019s where the postcards come from, two or three a month). Me, for the Sawtooth Mountains, where Janice loved to camp and hike, where I found five acres for sale. So far I\u2019ve paid a man to drill a well, then dug a hole in the earth myself for a septic tank. Next month linemen will branch off the power pole at the highway, then peg up the hillside, to my still-curing 15\u2019 by 15\u2019 cement form.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a lot like camping right now. I\u2019m still months out from finishing my 225 square foot cube, with walls as tall as they are wide and a roofline that mimics the slope of the hillside, but the skeleton is quickly taking shape. I drive my truck and trailer down to the valley in the mornings, to work my new finish carpentry gig in the glitzy mansions of Ketchum and Sun Valley, then haul wood scraps home each evening, where I hammer and saw by hand until dark. I\u2019ll need to have it finished before the frost in September, but that\u2019s several months away, and I\u2019m not worried. The loneliness is the only thing that worries me. That, and the fact that I\u2019ve started talking to myself.<\/p>\n
The woman at the humane society says hypoallergenic dogs, like Shih Tzu\u2019s and Poodles, wouldn\u2019t do well living in the snow half the year. She asks if I\u2019d like to meet Patty, a Saint Bernard, then takes me to her kennel, where Patty walks right up to my hand and slobbers all over it. It\u2019s hard not to love her, even though she\u2019s older and smells bad. The woman tells me that she\u2019s been stuck in a kennel for five weeks, because no one wants to rescue an older dog. Which is all the guilt trip I need to sign a bunch of papers and pay for Patty\u2019s boarding, then lead her to the cab of my truck, where she hikes inside.<\/p>\n
Janice\u2019s postcards are short and to the point, but constant. She talks about her hut and garden patch, how she\u2019s learning to speak Quichua and use her medical background to doctor the native people, if they get sick enough to trust her. I haven\u2019t chicken-scratched a letter on notebook paper since I picked up Patty at the shelter, weeks ago. There\u2019s too much to say. But I\u2019ll take time to write this Thursday\u2014summer solstice\u2014the longest day of the year. I\u2019ll tell her I\u2019ve learned to speak dog language. I\u2019ll tell her how Patty goes everywhere with me, to jobsites and restaurant patios in Ketchum after work. I\u2019ll tell her the metal roof is up, that the windows are hung, and the meter-main\u2019s flywheel is turning. I\u2019ll tell her this is the last letter I\u2019ll write to Ecuador, the last time I\u2019ll ask her to trade her hut for my cube, one tiny house for the other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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