It’s in the book.

I found a box of my grandmother’s things in the garage.  She saved everything in cigar boxes and coffee cans.  That’s because they fit into the big pockets she sewed onto all of her blouses.  She favored browns and yellows, especially if they were together on the same fabric, and plaid.  Whenever Bertha, I called her by her first name, found a pattern she liked, she sewed a week’s worth of blouses.  She liked the yard goods at Duckwalls.  The blouses had to have pockets to carry her cigarettes. lighter, and Kleenex in one, and in the other, a guidebook, little squares of newspaper, a pair of pliers or a rock hammer, and a coffee can.  She collected.  And she re-used buttons.  She had a cigar box full of antique buttons.  Bertha’s blouses were sewn from dime store cloth, a Vogue pattern design, and heirloom buttons.  When she put one on and started to fill her pockets, I ran for the cloth bag she’d sewn for me, and my hat.  It was a collecting day.

The cigar box smelled like Bertha.  Winstons, Pond’s cold cream, and the ranch.  Inside were several tiny fosillized seashells, each wrapped in its own square of newspaper.  The Roswell Daily Record, February 10, 1966.  I  imagined that it had been a cold, windy day.  My grandmother liked to hunt fossils in the winter, because it wasn’t snaky in and among the limestone and shale ledges down in the draw where she’d spotted these little treasures.

I rummaged through my bookshelves for her guidebooks.  She’d given them to me when her arthritis kept her from her nature walks over the hills and creeks, and pastures that made up the Rock House and Brown Lake ranches.  Ranching was my grandparents’ life, livelihood, and passion for more that sixty years.  When someone asked my grandfather if he had a hobby, he said ranching.

Bertha studied those guidebooks, and she walked.  She might take the same walk every day for a week, and would see something new every day.    Fossils on Monday, tiny cacti with microscopic spines and fuschia blossoms smaller than a Q-tip on Tuesday;  Wednesday she carried the bird book, pointed out meadow larks, a Harris’s hawk, and a killdeer’s nest.  Rocks on Thursday, and if we were lucky, we might see a piece of banded agate, evidence of past visitors to this terrain.  Fridays in the spring found us examining the lavender clusters of of wild verbenea, which always made my grandfather sneeze; mesquite flowers, and the bright red devil’s head cactus blossom.  Bertha circled each find.  Don’t pick them, she’d say.  We want to see them again next year.

My grandmother had to drop out of high school during the Depression to help her family.  She deeply regretted not going to college.  The guidebooks were her textbooks, and the ranch was her laboratory.  Bertha was a born naturalist. Her keen sense of observation, her love of nature, and her desire to keep learning have had a lasting effect on all of us, including the great grandchildren who walked with her in the garden or across the hills.

I use guidebooks for travel and for writing, for language and for gardening, but my most treasured reference books are the pocket field guides my grandmother carried in her pocket.