A long-time friend paid me a visit a while back. We had met in sixth grade at St. Joe’s Catholic School in Marietta, Georgia. Before, my friendships had felt like ephemera, for knowing my father would eventually be stationed to a different Air Force base. Military kids learn this dynamic early—or, we intuit it, absorb it unconsciously, and simply adapt, improvise, and overcome—as the Marines say.

Dad’s last station landed him at Dobbins Air Force Base, where the Lockheed corporation was building a gigantic transport plane, the Galaxy C-5A. I remember hearing a scream of engines and running out of the house to watch the enormous cruciform flying low, just above our pecan-tree neighborhood. Like a pregnant dragon.

I tie this period to my eleven-or-twelve-year-old self, and to Linda. We would play Man from U.N.C.L.E. in the dank caverns of my home’s basement, which housed a secret room of sorts—our hide-out. She played Napoleon Solo; I was Illya Kuryakin. Our relationship ebbed and flowed through high school and college years, and later, upon middle age. Having reached our seventh and eighth decades, we have found ourselves again, to laugh about Napoleon and Illya, and more—to mourn through shared sensibilities our country’s present and future. Less fraught, through a love of literature.

Linda is not fond of flying, and so it meant a lot when she announced she was coming to see where I live now, still in Wyoming—but in particular, where I have lived for nearly forty years, caretaking a piece of Earth with my “retired” husband. (The phrase in French is à la retraite, thus, closer in meaning to “retreat”, or “retreating from the world.” Just so.) Often commenting on how odd it was that I wound up here, my friend cites some perceived “sophistication” she believed I possessed. Leaning slightly more towards peasant, I guffaw and demure each time she repeats said belief. My yearly, or bi-yearly visits to see my parents, siblings, and friends back in Georgia through the years made travel here mostly unnecessary. And she was acquainted with Wyoming, having lived in Laramie for a gap year as a university landscaper; as it happened, the very first woman to do so, the first of her many challenges to the system.

One day during her visit as we ambled along a stretch of lonesome highway a quarter-mile from our place, Linda stopped, took in the sweeping view of rimrock to the east—crowned with a promontory named Lovers Leap—and opposite, to another ponderosa-bedecked ridge. Ever the generous one, she uttered her gift of loving observation, “I get it . . . okay, I get it now, Renée,” and beaming her Joan Baez-like countenance, we continued on.

Occasionally Jeff and I will hear and see B-1 bombers on training missions roaring overhead. I was pleased none had chosen to do so on that day.