She left me with a tow rope, a shovel and brief instructions as to how I could get out once someone came by, then she waved me off to make it to her appointment on time. I stood their shoveling around the tires and couldn’t recall anyone being worried about making it anywhere on time in this town. Then I looked up, a habit you do after someone dies, and I cursed Matt. Though I didn’t put too much faith in there being a heaven, I didn’t know where else to look. I knew that wherever he was, he was looking down on me laughing, because he used to say, “You could never handle winters here.” It wasn’t that I couldn’t, it’s that I never would have wanted to.
Once the third truck came by and towed me out of my winter nightmare, I went to the timberframe shop and covered the entrance wall with photographs that I had taken of Matt over the years. The photomontage started with our first road trip around Idaho. Then the photos and descriptions moved across the wall like the travels that had moved us around North America. There was the circle trip through the Canadian Rockies, the camping trip on the big island of Hawaii, our discovery of the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver Island, and finally our trip from last year through Mexico. Matt had rebuilt a refurbished Japanese motor for a 1986 Toyota van that we drove from San Francisco down the Pacific coast to the middle of Mexico, onward through Mexico City, up into Texas, over to Florida, up the Eastern seaboard and across the states back into Idaho. He had bought the van for one hundred dollars, the motor for three hundred, and spent two weeks comparing the old motor to the new motor with the keen eye of a self-taught expert. Next, he build a pine bed frame for the van which he cut down the center, installed some hinges, and made the piece so that it could fold up one side in order to get our personal items stored in laundry baskets underneath. It was in these glimpses of Matt’s ingenuity that had attracted him to me. It was the way he could create and solve any building or mechanical mystery and turn it into a project that kept him focused. When he had finished that project, I crawled onto our tri-fold mattress with him as we lay like spoons. In that moment, I waited for those three words that I always wanted to hear from him. I realize now that the safest way for Matt to communicate those words was through his accomplishments.
