Returning to Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

visually in their minds then sending it out in words. They would not dream of writing the stories down, Clarence quit school in the fifth grade and began working full-time at age eleven. Donald is the most purely physical person I’ve ever met in my life. After an exhausting summer day working construction he would take Herald and Clare fishing until darkness fell. He would sleep five hours and then be up at six a.m. to cook breakfast because I’m slow in the morning and because he liked to cook breakfast, a habit that started when his mother was taken away and Clarence often worked nights running his trapline or reconditioning boats in addition to working for my family. Right now I’m trying to make sense of my exhaustion. Our kids, Clare and Herald, wanted to move home from Los Angeles to help out but Donald wouldn’t allow it. David volunteered to return from Mexico early but I told him frankly that he would generally be more of a problem than a genuine aide. My main hope is when Polly’s son K comes back from Ann Arbor in three days. He’s going to live in the garage apartment out back and Donald likes and trusts him. Other than K it’s just me. He turns to stone with the neurologist and nurses. The simple fact is that Donald is deeply embarrassed by his illness and I don’t think that he’s going to get beyond this state. When I sleep on a single bed beside his own in the den it’s like when Clare was sick as a baby and I could hear her every breath even when I thought I was asleep. We’ve been lovers since I was fourteen and he fifteen, almost sixteen. Our children were raised almost by the time we were forty. We were so proud of them and then they were gone. I have enough money from my parents, mostly from my mother’s estate, but it was unthinkablefor Donald not to go on working. Despite this money when we went on trips, usually to the West with the kids, we didn’t stay in lodges or motels but camped. Donald wasn’t a tightwad, he just liked to camp. And not at regular campsites but off in the woods or beside rivers. Once in Wyoming we were camped beside the Green River and this old gentleman rancher came by on a horse and told us we were trespassing but then he and Donald started talking and we ended up staying four days while Donald and Herald, who could do a man’s work at fourteen, jacked up a bunkhouse and laid a course of cement blocks under it to stabilize the foundation. Like his father, Donald liked to be useful. I used to wonder if I first loved him because he was the opposite of my father, who was so aggressively useless and would lamely put on a pair of calfskin gloves while rigging his sailboat, which almost never left the harbor. Once Laurie and I caught my dad with a ninth-grade classmate of ours on his boat but I didn’t tell my mother because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I know K has an affection for me though at forty-four I’m nearly twice his age. I do realize that I’m not exactly homely. I like the neurologist, who is divorced, but he has an odor of offices and medicine, which I find repellent. Donald teases me that I better start looking for a boyfriend and that was nearly a year ago. When Polly came over for dinner two weeks ago she said she was worried because I was getting skinny and haggard from being with Donald around the clock but I said I love him and that’s what you do. Polly was very smart not to remarry my brother David, who is very nice but has been basically goofy since he was a little boy. He couldn’t accept the fact that Dad was a lost cause. I went through a long stretch when I thought the male and female were more similar than they turned out to be. Strangely,though there is a big age difference, Donald and K are more like boyhood friends. When they packed the SUV for their trip to see the glacier early last fall, they acted as if they were simply off on a fishing trip though Donald