On April 26, 2023, as family prepared to wander from an Airbnb to my sister Terry’s house just down the road, my cell phone rang. I have the habit of not answering calls from unknown numbers, even when they say Lihue, Hawai`i, or another such place suggesting the false possibility of reunion with a long-lost friend. This time the phone said Wallawalla, Washington, and I gambled. And answered. And, lo and behold, it was someone not asking for money!

Over the previous few days, family members had trickled in to Terry’s new place near Crescent City, California. Ken, his wife Kathy, and their kids (my grandkids) drove from Colorado and arrived an hour before Tyler and I the night before–Tyler picked me up at the airport in Medford on his way up from Santa Cruz. Terry’s kids flew from Indiana and drove from Idaho. Younger sister Peg brought Tutu–who is our mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother–from the Bay Area, Peg also beginning her trip near Santa Cruz.

All these people outside in movement around me and I’m on the phone. The Airbnb is a big yellow house surrounded by green lawn surrounded by redwood forest. I tuck in next to the house in order to hear better, then move toward a tall, old, fibrously barked tree. It holds so many years in its growth, so many lives at its base, such a different story from the one I hear on the phone. About the desert. About desert writers. About my friend Ellen Meloy, who died suddenly in November of 2004 while I was living in Hawai`i, as different a place from her desert as the California redwoods.

“I know who you are,” I say to the man on the phone, a combination of hope and excitement rushing through me.

“We’ve done things differently this year,” he says, and I pause, unsure. He mentions another writer. I don’t know what he’s saying.

We have gathered to celebrate Tutu’s ninetieth birthday, the gathering itself the birthday gift. All her daughters. All her grandchildren. And all her great-grandchildren: Lacey and Lucas. We have already gone to the beach, Tutu and Peg sitting on a log watching Lacey and Lucas race to the water; Lacey racing the waves as they pulse up the shore and recede, me running with her; Lucas finding sand dollars, then Lacey, too, racing to show them to “Unk Ty” and the kids’ parents; Terry and Boots walking together; Brian and Elizabeth bending to look at something on the sand; then people switch, Brian and Tyler, Elizabeth and the kids, Terry checking in with Tutu and Peg, Boots romping with dog Rigby, Peg telling Tutu who is where and what they’re doing, and that energy follows us home. Where we slow down a notch to prep lunch and eat. And then gather things to take to Terry’s just down the road. And my phone rings. And I answer.

They have all walked to Terry’s, except for Peg and Tutu, Peg bringing games–badminton, croquet, she has thought of everything!–and her mother in the car, too much to carry and Tutu cannot see well enough to easily navigate the shadows and roots of redwoods between the big yellow house and Terry’s lovely little cottage.

I am alone. And aghast, as the man on the phone continues explaining. Reassuring me that indeed, I have won. So has someone else. Two winners. Not co-winners. Separate and equal winners.

Does that even matter? I don’t know. I have flown to the tips of the redwoods, soared out toward the sea. I got the call. The day before my mother’s ninetieth birthday. My mother, matriarch of our family, the generations growing from her roots an ecosystem of biology and diversity and complexity, of creativity and perseverance and love.

They are all gone. I land, calm myself, head to Terry’s sweet cottage on its five acres of grass and flowers and redwoods. Head to my family. Brimming. Bubbling. Not speaking. Waiting. Looking at the huge tree stumps from redwoods logged years ago, at the rich ecosystems they harbor. Lacey and Lucas showing me everything. My mother on a porch, watching. Maybe resting. But then she’s walking toward the fabric of her family, four generations in one place. I wait until she’s near and can sit on a stump and listen.

“I want to make an announcement,” I start.

“You’re not pregnant,” says my big sister.

I’m sixty-eight. I wait until they stop laughing. “I just got a call from the chair of the Ellen Meloy committee….”

Terry gasps. My mother grins. They know.

“Yes,” I say. “I fucking won!” They clap and cheer and then Peg says maybe I could explain for those who don’t know and I do. I tell them that Ellen Meloy was a friend, “Tyler you may not remember her but you heard her read at Pack Creek Ranch,” and that she died too young (she was fifty-eight), and that this award in her honor to support desert writers started in 2005 and my good friend Becca Lawton won the first one–many of them know who Becca is–and that I have applied every year since. 

For seventeen years.

And finally I fucking WON!

The proposed project, I tell them, is a book called The Last Cows. I look at Ken, who may be worried about what I will write, tell him the amount of the award, and in that moment everything is okay. 

Then my mother, who is also a writer and has read many drafts of many applications, stands and moves toward me. And I know from her hug that this is almost as big a gift for her as it is for me. 

https://ellenmeloy.com

Because I am still inept at producing a blog and can’t remember the way to insert captions, here ya go: All photos are by Peg Pierce. The top pic is Unk Ty, Lacey, and Lucas. Next, beach party, with much but not all of the family. Then, ecosystems, with Lacey Park Lausten and Elizabeth Park Tobey, followed by The Hug. Last but not least, Tutu and Terry, stumped.