From Annie Proulx's book, Close Range, Wyoming Stories: A Lonely Coast:
"Josanna Skiles cooked at the Wig-Wag. She had two women friends, Palma Gratt and Ruth Wolf, both of them burning at a slower rate than Josanna, but in their own desperate ways also disintegrating into drifts of ash."
"They thought they were living then, drank, smoked, shouted to friends, and they didn't so much dance as straddle a man's thigh and lean in."
"There were times when I thought the Buckle was the best place in the world, but it could shift on you and then the whole dump seemed like a mess of twist-face losers, the women with eyebrows like crowbars, the men covered with bristly red hair, knuckles the size of new potatoes, showing the gene pool was small and the rivulets that once fed it had dried up. I think sometimes it hit Josanna that way too because one night she sat quiet and slumped at the bar watching the door, watching for Elk, and he didn't come in."
"This's a miserable place," she said. "My god it's miserable."

I've been immersed in Annie Proulx for a while. I'm staggered by her sharp writing. So much ragged raw life in so few pages. It's a tic on the depressing side for February reading in Minny, but it draws you in, deep.

I was the first, and perhaps only, one in our large Catholic family to get divorced. It was hard to break the news to my folks and family. Even harder, in many ways, to break it to my friends. Couples my soon-to-be-ex and I had known for so many years, and were close with, vacationed together, dinnered and drank, watched families grow, and parents pass; followed through life. I felt the stunned reactions like a wave of hard hurt. There is an anxiety before the telling, steeling yourself for the reaction, hoping you won't fall apart and dissolve into a heap of rumpled flesh, your bones all gone to mush from sadness, stress, and the panic that comes from starting down an unfamiliar dark road you never suspected you'd be on.

It took a lot out of me to tell my girl friends. Mostly I emailed. The letters I sent were brief, but heartfelt, and I needed the distance, couldn't trust my voice to carry me through on the phone. I cried, in private, when I read the responses.

Two of my closest girlfriends came and gathered me up, took me to dinner. It was a needed thing. We went to a Mexican place, back when the food was still good there. The topic hung in the air like a rotten corpse while we chatted about nothing. I braced for it, and when we'd cleared an obvious place in the conversation, like an empty stage for the story, I spoke, the briefest of conversations, the heaviest of words. It seems like I'm describing a death here, and it was. The passing of 25 years of a marriage and all the life and living that goes with it; done, dead, and buried six feet deep. With nothing to take it's place. With everything to take it's place.

My girlfriends had brought gifts: wine and bubble bath, essentials. One of them handed me a small bag in which something rattled. A knife, fork and spoon. From the Goodwill store. The dam burst; we laughed, about a lot of things. We cried. We talked a little trash.

I've done all right going down that new road. It's only dark at night, when it should be. It's familiar now, and comfortable. I kept the silverware. It reminds me of the many women in my life who have heart. And who know you will be okay after all, and know enough to say it with wine and bubble bath and a few pieces of old tableware, with no need for words.