Mount Shasta, CA, September 2, 2003: Adrienne has done it right. The best time to leave a job or profession is when you’re at the top. She is, and she has.

For the last ten years she’s operated Adrienne’s All-Weather DogWalking Service in Marin County. A month ago, she sent a letter to her clients, to let them know she was closing her business, because we were moving away.

Oh, the tears! She’s become part of the lives of these families, including the Mayor of Ross and one of Arnold Schwartzenegger’s current advisory panel. The lovely letters she’s received are quite touching. She says all the dogs could tell. She told each one. The last day, she saw Izzy and Coley.

She and Coley Mulroy, a large black lab, like to dance to country music. He puts his paws on her shoulders, and she says, “Shake it, Coley” and he does the shimmy, to the strains of Shania Twain. She had her last dance with Coley. She said good bye.

When I picked Adrienne up on Sunday, she and I and Tulip and Percy got into the new Ford.

And we drove away.

Near Carl and Cole, San Francisco: Lori Jane Ingram, my then wife, was an attorney by schooling who disliked lawyering, and who ran the operations side of our company, Network Answering Service.

She was good at it, interviewing and hiring the operators, training them, scheduling, and keeping our official manual up to date: very important, we believed. She organized our annual Christmas Party, and she instigated the ‘TGIF’ Pizza Party, where we brought in a dozen huge pizzas every Friday afternoon, the office kitchen filled with the scent of fragrant tomato sauce. Operators who weren’t scheduled on Fridays dropped in anyway, so we knew it was a hit.

For such a thoroughly modern Millie, now and then she enjoyed sewing.

Before the Wherehouse record store moved in, the building across the street sold fabrics. There Lori would prowl the patterns bin. These envelopes, with names like Vogue, Butterick, and McCall’s, pictured a dress or blouse, and contained huge tissue-paper patterns to be cut out with pinking shears, those strange scissors that cut a zig-zag line. It was like making full-sized paper dolls.

With fabric covering our dining table, pinning the pattern to the cloth, Lori spoke with a mouthful of pins. “Grnmmrph,” she said, “Lrrrn mufr grnmmph rrmuphr.”

What?

And then, for Christmas, she made me a beautiful bathrobe. In thick, soft, deep blue cloth, the robe was at once heavy and a delight upon the skin. Big pockets and a sash, and I felt like Henry the Fifth. I wore it, with great delight, for years and years.

The Spring following, we’d taken some days-old kittens from the Humane Society. When kittens arrive that young, a volunteer must be found to nurse them, else they die. I was that volunteer, and we had six kittens the size of little blind mice, to be fed one by one with the tiny bottle. They lived, they tumbled, they opened their tiny blue eyes and gazed with wonder and awe at me, their huge mama. They kicked, they rolled, they walked, they scampered, they climbed everywhere, and when they were old enough I returned them to the Humane Society where they were all adopted and went on to other adventures.

Except for one. This one stayed with us. When I dozed in my robe upon the sofa, the kitten would creep into the sleeve, and there would nap along with me, as soft and lovely as my wonderful robe.

I’ve received presents in my lifetime. This robe was one of the best presents ever. It reminded me of a cowboy-style red shirt my grandmother once made for me; the shirt had a yoke with white piping, and pearl snaps for buttons. Back then, as a child, I revelled in the shirt because it was so beautiful, and I felt like a sharp dresser.

Now, as an adult, I revelled in the robe because it had been made, by hand, for me, with love.

Ten miles north of Henrietta, Texas, 1873: Several families from Iowa arrived, settling here on the rolling plains of north Texas. They built homes and planted rows of Bois d’Arc trees along the Fort Sill tract, a line of trees four miles long. Trees for shade, and trees for a windbreak.

Along this lane, the families settled, Ackers, Hoeber, McNeeley, Hooker, and Hurns they were.

Crossing the ragged road was Long Creek, marked by a wandering line of trees meandering across the prairie.

A mile up Long Creek lived the Millers, on whose land a big gas well would run wild in 1905. In the place I know as the farm, the Ackers family lived. That original home burned, but the well survived, dug deep by hand and lined with stone.

But most of these settlers moved on.

Cattlemen and cowboys came. In 1889, the Parker County School Land, a large tract of 17,000 acres, arranged for surveying by Mr. R. W. Watkins. Mr. Watkins hired a boy of 9 as driver for his hack, to carry stakes and equipment. That boy grew to be my grandfather, Frank Hurn.

The boy’s father, William Hurn, bought 200 acres in December, the first buyer from the tract, and the remainder was opened for settlement in 1890, at a price of $6.25 per acre. Settlers from all parts began to arrive. Wanting a community center, William persuaded the Gent & Fuller firm to donate two acres for a church and school.

The Post Office was a knottier problem. Several names (for the community) were sent to Washington. All were rejected, because for every name there was already a community in Texas with the same name! One day, after a second round of this disheartening news, Col. Bill Squires of the Henrietta Post Office, said to William Hurn, “The heck with it! You go home and forget it. I’ll send in a name that they’ll take.”

He sent in ‘Hurnville’, so Hurnville it was.

Mr. Luther Kelley of the Kelly Brothers firm in Henrietta built a store in Hurnville, but only three families ever lived in Hurnville itself, though the surrounding rich farmland was thickly settled by 1896. At that time, Hurnville sported the general store, a blacksmith shop, a barber shop, a short-order and cold-drink stand, two churches, a cotton gin, the Literary Society’s weekly newspaper, a one-room school, and Dr. Finley’s office.

William Hurn’s son Joe taught the Hurnville school, a three month school, for the lump sum of $75. This was the high point, and soon after, settlers began pulling up stakes to move further west. Rural Free Delivery replaced the Post Office. The growing nearby town of Petrolia drew away the Baptist Church. Hard times took the Methodist Church, and the tiny school was consolidated into Henrietta, the county seat.

When I was a child, my grandfather told me that he once carried the mail in a wagon up into Oklahoma Territory, where it went on to be delivered as the Pony Express. However, the dates don’t match up worth beans, so either he was a-woofin me, he was speaking of his father, or I disremember exactly.

The Pony Express, a remarkable feat in the American West, was in service only from April 1860 to November 1861, delivering mail and news between St. Joseph, Missouri, and San Francisco. My grandfather would have been born too late to be carrying mail for the Pony Express.

The 1890 Oklahoma Territory census still exists. Nearly all other old census records were destroyed by fire in 1921. This census was ordered in June of 1890 by Governor George Steele, the first territorial governor of Oklahoma. Oklahoma attained statehood on November 16, 1907, as the forty-sixth state. So I reckon my grandfather carried the mail up to Oklahoma, but not for the Pony Express.

In November of 1959, my grandfather wrote of these events. At that time Hurnville had a resurrected Baptist Church and Dan Oster’s filling station and grocery store. And as my grandfather wrote, “a community where all are friends and would welcome anyone who might come to join us.”

Of the original settlers of the Fort Sill tract, the descendants of only three still held title to land in 1959, those three being Bud Frey, Frank Hurn, and the descendants of F. D. Stine.

In 1972, I visited Dan Oster’s store with my friend, writer Barbara Austin. The church was gone, and Dan Oster was old. With the death of my grandparents, my mother had purchased the farm. Later, when she died, the farm was purchased by my cousin Nancy and her husband, rodeo champ Perry Lee, and they raised a family there. In some recent year, they sold the farm, and moved into town. I don’t know who owns it now. I wonder who lives in that place I knew so well.

In my uncle Eugene’s book “A Pictoral History of Clay County”, photographs can be found of the Hurnville that was, of William Hurn and of my young grandfather. You will find a copy in the Henrietta Library, or through the Henrietta/Clay County Historical Society.

In 1999, an acquaintance named Bob Hampton and his wife moved from Wichita Falls to a red brick house about 3 miles north of my grandparents farm, not far from where Dan Oster’s store once stood.

A cemetary remains. A concrete marker identified the location of the old school, but the marker vanished in the dust of a road-widening project.

There now remains the road, and memory.

Two monks were once travelling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was falling. As they came around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.

“Come on, girl,” said the first monk. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.

The second monk did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. “We monks don’t go near females,” he said. “It is dangerous. Why did you do that?”

“I left the girl there,” the first monk said. “Are you still carrying her?”

Two monks argued about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, “The flag moves.”

The other said, “The wind moves.”

They argued back and forth but could not agree.

Hui-neng, the sixth Patriarch, said: “Gentlemen! It is not the flag that moves. It is not the wind that moves. It is your mind that moves.”

Where is the center of a life?

For me, it’s a place: my grandparents’ farm, eight miles north of Henrietta, Texas. Not the homes in which my mother and I lived when I was a child, but the farm.

The town where I went to college comes close. In some ways, college years were the most important and best years of my life. Now, of course, so long afterward, I know not a soul in that town, and the place I lived is surely no longer standing. The University and it’s buildings will have changed, the businesses and the town no doubt hardly to be recognized. Yet some part of me is still there.

Even more so, the farm. My mother dwelt there as a child; she lived there on the day she died. I grew up there, as much as in the town. Running through the woods, wading through the metal bin filled with grain — it was like water, only thick and smooth. Peering everywhere: down into the water tower, through the fence to watch the pigs, hiking around the tank, climbing rusting machinery, watching grandmother wash, cook, garden.

Some part of me grew there, and forever lives there still.

When my mother died, my dreams for exactly one year were odd in this: No matter the subject of the dream, the farm appeared. A dream of travel would be to, or from, the farm. A dream of worry would take place within the rooms of the farm. A dream of flying would espy the farm on the horizon.

Always, the farm. There is no escaping it. It is me.

San Anselmo: Yesterday, Adrienne and I packed our household into boxes. She groaned and complained, claiming she was near wit’s end. Adrienne hates clutter; in fact it makes her crazy.

But just when I feared that she might self-destruct, bursting into flames like those cases of spontaneous combustion, she hit her stride for an excellent flying finish. Kitchen, bath, dishes, and clothing. All in boxes.

In the kitchen, remaining to us we have some cans on a shelf, two plates and cups, two pans on the stove, and a spoon to share. I kind of like it. Life seems simple.

This is a simple law of nature, but one which is very handy:

When you move to a new place, you have a window of expanded freedom.

That’s it.

Somehow, when we move to a new place — a different city, a different apartment, a different country — a window of time opens up in which it becomes more possible to make changes. It will be, for a time, easier to do new things or to do things in a new way.

This window of time is not forever, but it’s as if for a time you leave your emotional baggage behind. For a time, you’re less constrained by your past habits. For a time, life is again new, more as it appeared when we were children, fresh and with infinite possibilities.

Do you think that, by moving, you will escape your present difficulties? You do? Well, for a time, it’s true.

Knowing this important secret of the universe, go forth and prosper.