Jenny died at 2:30am while I was holding her in my arms, whispering to her how much I loved her. One minute she was laying there fading in and out of consciousness, and the next minute she had stopped breathing. As I held her, I felt her life force leave her, and something huge was ripped out of my heart. I sat there hugging her empty body, not knowing what to do. I straightened her arms, and pushed her hair off of her face, and gave her my last kiss. The nurse came in, and said, “She’s gone, Sam.” Those were the ugliest words that I had ever heard. I stood there bereft, looking down at her and crying. I couldn’t think of what to do. I had told the hospital that she wished to be cremated, something that we had arranged for ourselves years ago with the Oklahoma Cremation Society. I walked numbly out of the hospital, and sat in my truck, without even the energy to even put my key in the ignition. My partner in life was gone. I wanted so badly to be able to look in her eyes, and say, “What now?” During my years with her, she was my go-to person, that when I was stuck, I could always sit and hold her hands, and we would figure out what to do. But now she was not there to talk with, and I didn’t know what to do next. I sat there crying for a long time, until a security guard for the parking lot knocked on my window, and asked if I was alright. No, I was not alright, but sitting there in the parking lot was not accomplishing anything, so I put the key in, and cranked up my truck, and drove home through the dark stillness of the city. 

Over the next couple weeks, I moved as if barely animated through the fog of my sorrow. I cried so much that I felt like I would never be able to stop. My chest hurt all the time, and it felt like I must be having a heart attack. There was a gaping hole in my heart, and I felt empty. I quit my job. I moped around our house, barely able to look at the things of our life, because they made me cry harder. I cried a lifetime’s worth of crying. At one point, I found myself wishing that I had a gun, so I could just put an end to the pain. I was doing me no good. Fortunately, Jennys sister, Becky, came over a lot and even though she was dealing with her own sorrow, she sat with me, and succored me with her big heart and loving ways, and I started to think about what the future might be like for me ahead. A couple of her teacher friends arranged a memorial service at her school, and many of her friends, and fellow teachers, and a handful of her students came to share their grief. I gave a eulogy, and then we let the people come up front and say what was in their heart. The kids came forward of their own volition, and recounted stories of Mrs. B, and how she had made their lives more rich. It was very healing for me knowing that I was not alone in my sense of loss. At one point in the service, out on the school playground, a beautiful butterfly flitted about us, and landed on my arm. I looked at it, as it sat there peacefully for a couple minutes, and was soothed by memories of the beauty of Jenny, and of our life together. 

I was stuck. I didn’t know how to move forward. When someone that you love deeply dies, it is a time for re-evaluation of almost everything. I had to sit and decide about goals. There were things that we were planning to do together, and I had to decide what I wanted to do about them. Some of the things we planned were because Jenny wanted to do them, and some were because I wanted to do them. And some things were just things that we had come to decide together that we wanted to do. This is the nature of a long term relationship. So, which of those things did I still want to do? Though I was averse to looking at it, I was alone, Jenny was not here to have her say about my decisions. And if I wanted to move forward and get out of my funk, I had to choose what things were still valid for me. We had always talked about joining Peace Corps together, and I found that it was still something that I wanted to do, even by myself. One of our goals had been that we would fly to France and spend a week walking through the Louvre, enjoying the art. That was more Jennys desire than mine, and so I crossed it off the list. At the very least, I realized, I would have to get to a point where I had my own direction, based on my own interests, if for no other reason, than to have a starting point for my new life. It was so scary to think about a life without Jenny’s wise council. I didn’t feel strong enough. One of the best things about having been married to her, was that together, we were so much more than the sum of two people. I knew I had some serious healing to do. Being a lifetime voracious reader, I went and bought a book about it. I think it was called, Up From The Ashes :The Phoenix Syndrome. It talked about dealing with grief, and making decisions to have a forward path. 

I decided to put my stuff into storage, and put our house on the market to sell it, and to embark on a journey of healing and self re-discovery. I really didn’t know who I was as a single man. It had been a long time since I had made a decision without taking Jenny into consideration. A month or so later, I was ready to leave. I was going to drive my truck around America, and see all the things that I had ever wanted to see. And visit with old childhood friends, and college friends, who were scattered hither and yon across the United States. I figured I would take a year to do it. I built a cap for my truck bed, and packed it with my camping gear, and some tools, and my yellow labrador dog Sabu, my fishin pole, and my guitar. I decided to head west first, from Texas to Berkeley California, where my college friend Fast Rob Meyer lived. I had been writing to him, and he invited me to come and experience the Berkeley life, where he was a chef at a restaurant. I could make it up after that, as opportunity and the vagaries of life allowed me. First stop would be the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

I had always wanted to visit the Grand Canyon. To get to the north rim, I had to drive west on the highway, then cut north, through the Indian Reservation, and cross the Colorado river at Marble Canyon, then back south to the park. As I left the highway, and started across the Rez, I found myself thinking, this is the ugliest, shittiest, most sere and unproductive terrain that I had ever seen. That thought was to come back to me several times over my journey for the next year, and every time it did, it was an Indian Reservation. When I finally got to the park, it was still closed from the winter. It was only late April, and the North Rim park is at 8000 feet above sea level elevation, and the entrance road had 3 feet of snow from not having been plowed all winter, and the gate was closed and locked. Shit. It had taken me a whole day to cross the rez and get here, and the only way out was back across the Marble Canyon bridge, and back through all that ugliness to the highway. I drove back to a little crossroads near the park entrance, where there was a gas station, a little store, and a motel. I got Sabu and I a room, and dumped my stuff on the bed, and decided to go for a run. I was still running in those days, and loved to jog down the road, with Sabu trotting along beside me. He liked running too. It didn’t occur to me that I had been running in Austin, which is at sea level. I ran about a quarter mile, and veered off the road, and fell, gasping for breath, into the bar ditch. Sabu, seemingly not affected much by the elevation, came back to me laying in the ditch, and was nosing me, and looking worried. I laid there for about a half an hour, getting my breathing under control. Ok, so running was not happening. I walked slowly back to my cabin at the motel, under the tall pine trees, while humming birds were zooming back and forth over my head. I made dinner, and went to bed.

The next morning, I girded up my loins for the journey back to the highway, and repacked my stuff, and Sabu and I walked to the little store, to buy ice for my cooler. I asked the clerk at the store when the park was due to open. In two weeks, he told me. I groused about my bad timing, and he told me to wait a minute, and went into the back room. He came back in a minute, with a sheet of paper, that was a simple hand drawn map of the roads going through the Kaibab National Forest, which surrounds the park and the canyon. He told me that the gravel roads in the National Forest were in good shape, and I could drive past the North Rim park, and would eventually come out on the rim of the canyon, and could camp anywhere. Yay! So off we went, and I drove out of the pines, and through large glades of Aspen trees. The gravel roads were clear, and flat, and I followed the map south. All of a sudden, I rounded a bend, and the road came out along the canyon rim, about 10 feet away. The vista was so enormous and unexpected, that I reflexively jerked the steering wheel to the right, away from the rim, and ran off the road. I stopped, with my heart beating fast. I was not going fast, and was actually in no danger of driving off the edge, but the canyon is so huge, that when you see it, your mind doesn’t know what to do with the information your eyes are giving it. So, I left my truck in the ditch, and walked over to near the edge, and had my first look at the magnificent canyon. It is 10 miles wide at that point, and though I could sort of see the south rim off in the distance, it went as far as I could see either way sideways. I got back in my truck and drove on. A half an hour later, I found a place where I could back my truck off the road, with the tailgate facing the canyon, and decided to camp there for the night. There was nobody else in the forest that I could see, and I had passed no other cars or people. Sabu and I had dinner, and I sat on the tailgate of my truck as the sun went down, and played my guitar, with my feet dangling near the edge. 

As I sat there, singing, I started thinking about a song that had been rattling around in my head ever since Jenny died, and I worked on it. I wrote the song that night, and I think it may have been the best song that I ever wrote. It was full of loss and sadness and hope. As it turned out, it was so sad a song, that it almost always made me cry when I played it over the next couple years, and I didn’t play it often. Later, in the Peace Corps, I was camping with a group of volunteers one weekend, and we had been passing a guitar around, and it came into my mind as I was playing, so without thinking, I sang it for them. When I finished, I looked around, and every one of the volunteers around the fire had tears running down their cheeks. It was too sad a song. I haven’t played it since then.

I headed back to the highway a couple days later, and camped my way toward Berkeley. I always tried to find a lake or a river that I could camp beside, and being a morning person, got into the habit of getting up just before sunrise, and making a cup of coffee, and sitting beside the water watching the sun rise. When it was light, I would sometimes play my guitar, sometimes I would get my fishin pole and fish, and sometimes I would read the book about springing up from the ashes of tragedy. In Barstow California, I stopped in a Sears, and bought a Jeans jacket in Beckys size, and vowed to embroider it to within an inch of its life, and cover it with colors, and when I got back to Austin, I would give it to Becky, to thank her for helping me to move forward with my life. I stopped into a sewing store, and bought colored threads, and a hoop, and the box that I have carried my embroidery stuff in ever since. I drove up alongside a river coming down from the Sierra Nevada mountains, and camped on its banks, and caught brown trout to fry for breakfast as the sun came up. Every day I would take out the jacket, and work on it for half an hour or so.

Eventually I drove out of the mountains and across the state to Berkeley and to Robs. I spent about 3 weeks with him, and had a great time. I finished my book about grieving while visiting him. I had also been reading a series of books I bought before leaving, written by Piers Anthony, one of my favorite writers of science fiction, called the Incarnations of Immortality. The main character in one of them, Melanie, and alien woman, always read her tarot cards every day to see what was in store for her. The way she used tarot had gotten my interest, and while I was in Berkeley, the heart of alternative thinking, I walked into a new age store, and asked if they had tarot cards. The woman pointed me to an aisle, and I went back, and in a bin, pasted to large sheets of posterboard, were about 20 different sets of tarot cards. I spent an hour looking at them, and finally chose a deck of cards with colorful pictures on them, and found a book called Mastering the Tarot, by Eden Gray. I taught myself how to throw a reading, and got into the habit of reading my cards every day or two. I also found another book about what to do when someone that you love has died. I was set, and I headed north from Robs the day the earthquake that cracked Candlestick Park happened. I remember feeling the ground shudder under me as I drove north on 101, and later hearing about the stadium on the news. I camped along the ocean as I traveled north, and fished, and embroidered, and read, and did my cards every morning before setting off to the next campground. Sabu and I were having a good time traveling together. 

Just before I left on my journey, the Cremation Society had sent me Jennys ashes. Her mother had asked for them, to be buried next to her sisters grave, who had died in the Xenia tornado while we were in college, and since I was going to end up in Cincinnati, where she lived, at some point in my travels, I stuck the box in the back of my truck. I took to talking to them sometimes as I traveled, telling her the stories of my travels, and telling her how much I missed her. They had arrived in a brown paper wrapped box, and I had plans to make a nice wooden box to put them in, for her mom. That was what the tools under my bed in the back of my truck were for. I had bought some oak boards while in Berkeley, and in northern California, I camped in a campground with RV hookups, and spent a couple days crafting a nice oak box just big enough for them to fit in. As I crossed into Oregon, in Grants Pass, I found a jewelry store and had a small gold plaque engraved with her name and dates, and fastened it to the top. Entering Grants Pass, I drove under an arch which said, “Grants Pass. It’s the Climate.” I had my windows down, but the climate felt the same as it had felt while driving through northern California. Maybe it wasn’t the right season.

Before I had left, I had listed my house for sale with the realtor who had sold us the house, but the economy was in the dumps, and the best offer the realtor had gotten so far, was $20,000 less than I owed on it. She had told me the day before I left, that if I was in Oregon, I should look up her sister, Deb, who was a hippie, like me, and I would get along with her well. I called Deb from Grants Pass, and told her that I would be in Sun River in a couple days, and asked if I could come by and visit her. Yes, she said, I should come by, she had heard about me from her sister, and she was looking forward to meeting me. I spent a couple days camping at Crater Lake, an amazing place, and drove over to Sun River.  Debs backyard was at the edge of a national park, and I set my tent up, and over the next couple days, got to know, and like Deb a lot. She was a peaceful woman, who was a massage therapist at the resort there, and practiced the Healing Arts.
Several years before Jenny died, I had been working as a carpenter for a buddy, and one day, as we walked through the mall for something or another, he was chiding me about talking big, but not following through with action to back up my words. 

Me: Like what?Tom: Like something outrageous. Like you wouldn’t get an earring.Me: You don’t think I would get an earring?Tom: No, you might say so, but you wouldn’t actually do it.Me: Five bucks. I bet you five bucks I would do it.
He had not noticed, but we were standing near an ear piercing stand in the middle of the mall, and they had a sign, “Special Today, Ear Piercing for Only $5”. He took out a 5 dollar bill, and was waving it at me, laughing. I snatched the bill out of his hand, and turned, and gave it to the girl in the piercing place, and said, “Put an earring in my ear.” She looked startled, as did Tom, and asked me, “What earring do you want?” I said, “I don’t care, just pick one, and put it in my ear.” So she did. I was facing with my right ear towards the girl, so she pierced that ear. I thanked her, and we walked away, and I laughed that Tom had nothing to say. I didn’t think much about it as time went on. One day while walking through the same mall, Jenny laughed and said, “Honey, that guy over there is giving you the eye.” “No,” I said, “he isn’t.” But I looked, and he was. He made a kissy face at me. Jenny thought it was hilarious. I heard from a friend a couple days later, that having your right ear pierced was a subtle sign that you were gay, and in the days where not that many people were out of the closet, except maybe in San Francisco, it was the way you let like minded people know your proclivities. I didn’t care much about that. I had gay friends and had no issues about it. Occasionally I would feel my butt being pinched in an elevator, or notice a guy looking at me with a long look, but I just ignored it. Later I quit working for Tom, and applied for a job of outside sales for a tool and supply company. In the interview with the owner, he told me that he liked my drive and independence a lot, and would hire me, except for the earring in my ear. He said, this is a small family company, Sam, and though this is something I am not allowed to ask, I don’t want problems, so I am going to ask you anyway… “are you gay?” He had seen the earring, and even tho he was a Texas redneck bidness owner of about 60 years of age, he knew about the gay ear versus the straight ear. I told him that I was not, and he said he would give me the job if I got rid of the earring. Well, I wanted the job, so I said yes, and did so.

Fast forward to Oregon, and sitting with Deb one night, she was looking at the hole in my ear lobe, and asked me if I was gay. “No,” I replied, “Is that a problem?” “Oh no,” she reassured me, “I was just curious about you having your right ear pierced. I bet you look great with an earring.” I told her the story of the bet, and she laughed. She told me that she had the key to the spa that she worked out of, and asked if I would go there with her after hours, and let her pierce my left ear. Sure, if that was what she wanted. I didn’t really care one way or the other, I am not an aesthete. So we drove over to the spa, and before I knew it, I was seated before one of those 3 panel mirrors that they have in beauty shops, and Deb had selected an earring from their piercing kit. She loaded it into the rubber band activated plastic gun, and took a sharpie, and made a dot in the center of my left ear lobe. I closed my eyes and sat relaxed, and in a minute, felt the piercing gun on my ear lobe. It seemed to be taking her a long time, and the gun was not holding steady, but was moving around a little. I opened my eyes and looked into the mirror, and saw Deb holding the gun but she had her eyes squinched closed, and her face turned away. I quickly grabbed her hand and pulled it away from my ear. “I don’t want an earring in my neck, Deb, you have to look at it when you do it.”

“I can’t watch it,” she said. “It makes me feel queasy.”

So I grabbed her hand, and put the gun centered on the dot, and told her to pull the trigger. Zap! And I had an earring in my ear.

A couple days later she told me that she had a week off work, and did I want to go camping at a really cool place? Yes I did. So we packed up my truck, and headed into the mountains. At one point, she said, “Turn in here.” It was a farmers gate. I turned in, and we drove along a dirt road that went up the side of the mountain. The road got smaller and smaller, and then disappeared altogether, and I was in a field of rocks and boulders. “Where to now?” I asked. Just keep going up. I clanked and clunked over rocks and around boulders, and it got pretty steep. Finally we came over the crest, and before us was a beautiful blue lake. I drove down to the shore, and parked. Nobody else was around us, or around the lake that I could see. It was an idyllic spot, quiet and peaceful, and we set up camp. As the sun went down, I could hear the calls of the coots on the lake. We camped there completely alone for 3 or 4 days, went skinny dipping in the cold lake water, and in the mornings I would get up and make my coffee, and her tea, and I would read her tarot card reading. Or embroider. Or fish. In the evenings I would sit and play the guitar as the sun went down. It was so peaceful.
We drove back to Sun River, I dropped Deb off, and I headed on north toward Seattle, where I knew a guy who used to live in Texas. I ran around Seattle for a couple weeks, hiked in the Hoh rainforest on the olympic peninsula, and enjoyed the rainy cool climate. After enjoying Seattle, I headed southeast toward Boise Idaho. While in Seattle, I had called my guitar playin buddy Jim, in Austin, and asked him what his 9 year old son, Jubal, was doing for the summer. Nothing. So I sent him a plane ticket for Jubal, and told Jim that I would take him with me across the upper plains states to Ohio, and would send him back just before school started again. Jim agreed, so I headed across the east Oregon high plains desert toward Boise, where I would pick up Jubal.

About 2am in the morning, as I was driving east, drinking coffee to stay awake, Bambi fell out of the sky, and landed on the road right in front of me. I slammed on my brakes, and swerved to the left, to go around Bambi, who was scrabbling around on the pavement, trying to get to her feet. I was down to about 20mph, way over in the left berm of the highway and had just seen Bambi pass out of the edge of my headlight beams, when she regained her footing, and leaped over the corner of my front fender, and landed right in front of me, and bam, I hit her. She slid down the road in front of me. By the time I got stopped and got out of the truck, she had again regained her feet, and had run off into the forest. But she left behind my shattered grill and deeply dented hood on my truck. Well that will wake you right up.

I picked up Jubal the next morning and we drove eastward toward Ohio. We visited the Badlands, and Mt Rushmore, and Devils Tower, and Custers Last Stand, and Craters of the Moon state park. We swung south to spend a week camping in Yellowstone Park, and see geysers and the mud pots. Yellowstone is a very cool park, if you ignore the teeming masses of tourists. Early one morning I was moving to a new campground in the north end of the park just after sunrise. I was coming down a long slope out of the mountains, which went across an enormous low meadow, and could see ahead of us, a moose, standing beside the road. I had never seen a moose before. When I first saw him, he was about 2 inches tall. He kept getting bigger as we got closer. I poked Jubal, in the passenger seat, who was dozing. He was not a morning person.

Me: Jubal, Jubal! Look! Bullwinkle!

Jubal: Who? Who is Bullwinkle?

Me: Bullwinkle the moose. Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.

Jubal: Who? I don’t know who you are talking about.

And he went back to sleep. I slowed down as we drove closer, way down. The moose was standing right beside the road looking like he was going to cross it. As I came close to him, I was driving about walking speed. He was enormous. I was afraid he would feel moved to walk across the road just as I was passing, and would squash my truck. I shot pictures of him as we came close, and was barely creeping as we drove past him. I looked out my truck passenger window when we were right in front of him, and all I could see was 4 legs. Even his stomach was higher than the top of my truck.

All along the way to Ohio, we camped in campgrounds. I would set up my campstove on the picnic tables and cook food for the three of us. Sabu liked camp food as much as Jubal did, though he drew the line at S’mores. He just didn’t like marshmallows. I often had people come into our campsite while I was sitting on the picnic table playing guitar, or reading my tarot cards. We would exchange life stories. Sometimes they would ask me to do a card reading for them, and I was getting better at making the stories that the cards revealed. The saddest part of those times were the stories of the people. Many of them were old folks, who had retired and bought an RV, and were spending their golden years driving around America. Too often, one or the other of the couples was dealing with serious illness like old people get, and it was so much more tragic for them, being on the road without a home base. I vowed many times to not let that happen to me, but to get my traveling done while I was young and could enjoy it. I would apply to Peace Corps as soon as I got back to Austin.

Soon, we arrived in Cincinnati, where I grew up, and I put Jubal on the plane back to Austin. School started in two weeks. I had been working hard on coming to terms with my grief, and was feeling like I had a pretty good future in store. The sadness wasn’t dragging me down so much anymore. I had become used to taking care of myself by myself again, something that I had not done since I married Jenny. Beckys jeans jacket was beautiful. The back of it was a view of the 3 Sisters mountains in Oregon, with the sun going down between the peaks. Almost every inch was covered with embroidery. It weighed a ton. I really hoped Becky would like it. It was a labor of love, and I hoped that my love for her would keep her warm. Being in Cincinnati was cathartic. I visited childhood friends, and went by the college, and went to see all the houses I had lived in as I grew up. I visited with my mother in law, and we spent time talking about Jenny. And in a way, I got back in touch with my roots.  

 I was just starting to champ at the bit about getting my life going again. I was excited about applying to PeaceCorps. I wasn’t tired of traveling, but wanted to get back home, so I could move forward with my life as a single guy. But I had to get back to Texas to do it. With that in mind, I drove north to New York to visit my college buddy Cecil. Driving across the Verrazano Narrows bridge into New York City was nerve wracking, and then out to Queens, where Cecil lived. I enjoyed my visit with him for a week or so, right after Thanksgiving. 

Another college friend, John, lived in a tiny town in the hills of New Hampshire, and that was my next stop. New Bedford was one of those stereotypical little New England towns, with colonial white churches everywhere. It was great to see John again. As it happened, John was getting ready to fly to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his parents lived. He asked me if I would be willing to stay at his house while he was gone, and take care of his dog, Pia, who got along well with Sabu. I agreed, and drove John to the airport a few days later. I was sitting in his living room one morning, the week before Christmas, and saw an advertisement for a Ski Resort nearby, and they were offering ski lessons, equipment rental, and an all day lift pass, for a paltry sum. The week before Christmas was a slow week at New England ski resorts, and they had been discounting the prices, to drum up bidness. I had always wanted to try downhill skiing, and I drove up there the next day. Almost nobody was there. Dogs were not allowed at the resort, so I put Sabu in the back of my truck, and went in and signed up. The lessons were comical, I fell down a lot. Finally I gained enough confidence to try the big slopes. As I stood in front of the lift, waiting for the lift seat to hit the back of my legs, I wondered if I could actually do this without breaking a leg. The ski lift seat hit me, and I scrambled to not fall out of it as it swept me up the mountain. Arriving at the upper lift station, I dismounted, and slid inexpertly around near the station.  As I eased toward the edge, and looked over, expecting the bottom of the slope to be “out there”, I froze. It was not “out there” at the angle I was expecting. instead, it was “down there”, like looking off of a cliff. I stood there, frozen, and thought about just riding the lift back down the mountain. I have always been afraid of heights, and I didn’t know if I could actually push myself off the edge. Fortunately, there weren’t very many people, and after steeling myself to take the plunge, I pushed over the edge, and I was skiing. Well, I was snowplowing, actually, and scared to death. I plowed down the slope, finally relaxing a tiny bit, and decided to try a swoop to one side, to get out of the middle of the slope, where the occasional skier was flying by. As soon as I tried to turn, my feet went out from under me, and I fell, tumbling and sliding, and skidded across, and ended up in the depression that was under one of the ski lift towers, with my skis tangled up and me on my back. People on the lift were laughing, seeing me there all cattywampus. Embarrassed, I untangled my skis, and lifted myself to my feet again, and shouted, “I have a college degree! I can do this!” The people on the lift above me laughed again. I got going anew, and plowed and skied the rest of the long way down the mountain without falling again. It was exhilarating. Arriving at the bottom, I wanted to tell someone, “Wow! That was great!” But there was nobody that I knew to tell, so I skied over to my truck in the parking lot, and told Sabu all about it. He was underwhelmed, but willing to listen anyway, because dogs are always willing to listen. I went up the mountain 6 or 7 times that day, and though I never got very good at it, the day was exciting.

After John got back from Tulsa, I headed south along the Atlantic coast, going from State Park to State Park. I met lots of interesting people in the campgrounds, and listened to the interesting stories of their lives. Around Charleston, South Carolina, I turned west, heading back toward Austin. School was back in session, and the parks were pretty deserted. It was peaceful, and Sabu and I explored the surrounding forests, not seeing anyone else for a week at a time. 

Arriving in Austin, almost exactly a year after I had left it, a friend invited me to live with him until I got my feet underneath me again. I immediately sent my application in to the Peace Corps, and spent the last of my life savings to buy a computer, and taught myself to become computer literate, and then signed up for massage school. I studied massage for the 3 month course, and spent the last 4 months doing outcall massage, waiting for Peace Corps to decide to let me join. I gave Becky her jacket and a big hug. I was a different person than the broken man I had been when I left. I still missed Jenny every day, and still found the sadness at her passing would cause me to cry, though it was a lot less than before. The day came to get on the plane and embark on my new journey with the Peace Corps, and into the new life ahead that I had created. I was excited, and ready for it. And I never looked back.
Self healing can work if you put your heart and mind into it    
I love America. It is an amazing and beautiful country