She announced early in February that she was taking the children camping in Nevada where the sun shone warm and the sky vibrated blue and the sandstone grottos would shelter their tent in shimmering desert solitude and beauty.  How wonderful and fun, I thought, but she announced this trip was for her and the children and I was not invited.  So they went camping and I went to work those gray snowy foggy days in February.  The still sandstone dunes radiated rainbow stripes of pinks and rusts and creams with occasional dripping springs and mystic hoodoos and ancient cryptic bat woman petroglyphs and piles of petrified wood and iron-spiked barrel cacti and mellow bighorn sheep and scurrying blue-throated lizards and deep trails of rust-red sand.  These filled and enthused the returning children, who told me brightly all about their wonderful fun adventure, not knowing anything was the matter.  It is February again, and they are there.

(Pictured above: Elephant Rock in Valley of Fire State Park, Nevada)