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By Root 349 0

as one more price of family. You can pick your clothes/you can pick a rose/ but kin and nose/you can't pick those. Includes brothers, who're somehow both easier and harder than parents. Paul, closest to her in age and outlook, but a distancer and being made more so by the war; there in the army in Australia, he has married a Queensland nurse and gives every indication he may stay on there after the war. Wally, out on the Ault. She thinks his is the unfairest story, in a way. The one of all the fate-begrudged Ringers who has his essentials intact, youth and health and a warmth toward life's possibilities. Instead of the duty of war, he could be devising a life with Winona. Even when he isn't in battle it must be hard, penned up with so many people. How she'd hated that herself at Alzona Park. Aboard ship must be a double confinement. Wally lately wrote that he wonders sometimes if he is really informed about how things are with the family, whether hard news of the never-easy state of the Ringers is kept from him. Not knowing can be worse than knowing, Berneta has always savvied that too, and so she has written back a line which came out odd yet is in the point-blank attitude he seems to need from somebody on the homefront. Don't worry, Wally—if there is anything very bad happens here at home, I'll write and tell you.

***

A few lines once again to let you know that I am fine, my grandmother meanwhile works away at her weekly letter to him from her Norskie kitchen captivity. And I hope these find you the same, Wallace.

Her third-grade penmanship toils for whatever can be reported. Another hard rain slowing up the plowing but helping the hay. A fire in a neighbor's chickenhouse. The chance of maybe going into town to a rodeo on the Fourth of July.

Then, amid her account of rhubarb canning and doing a big load of wash, suddenly here is Winona being written off. She's a nice enough kid in a way. But I learned Winona's ways what little time I spent with her. I nearly got my head bit off several times over nothing. It kind of amuses me about these silly girls.

Wally's breakup loyally ratified, my grandmother makes the usual turn toward closing. Well, dear, there doesn't seem to be much of any thing more to write about...

She determinedly says nothing, yet, about Berneta out there farther than ever in the Sixteen country.

***

"Sixteen Creek. Sixteen Creek." The barber contemplates with his comb still trying to find some natural order to my hair. "Never been up into that country. Can a man catch a fish there if he holds his mouth right?"

"Oh-it's-so-so; the-water's-pretty-riley; ye've-got-to-fight-brush," my father guards the stream which is all but tossing trout into our frying pan.

The scissors are starting to operate around my ears. "Hold still, Sunny Jim," the barber warns me. To my father again: "Suppose we about have this war won? What do you think of this man Truman?"

Affairs of world and nation get pronounced on while I goggle out the barbershop window at all-business Bozeman. Women and more women beeline into the shops and stores. An occasional calcified male goes creaking past to a bar. Cars have the street in frequent but not frantic use. This is neither martial Phoenix nor wind-worn White Sulphur Springs, this is a sound-as-a-dollar little city catering to its plump valley.

Here comes the part of barbering I really hate, the hair tonic. This of course is a barber who likes to slosh on the pooh-pooh water, positively dousing a persons scalp with the smelly stuff and rubbing it in like analgesic. Gabbing a mile a minute while his fingers mess around up there: "This'll fix you up for the Fourth of July, got your firecrackers picked out yet?"

Now it's my father's turn under the scissors. You have to look at him twice to figure out that he only slimly has the majority of a head of hair left. The sides from the temples back are perfectly full, and the stand of hair in the middle of his head is still holding strong; it is either side of the middle that has thinned away, widow's peaks that kept on going. He has had