Forty years ago today, my younger brother @20 years old had been dead for a week, and buried for about three days. Dad had fallen and broken a hip trying to locate the burial plot in a very rural cemetary, in the middle of an apple orchard, in the dark.
And I had come home from my Uncle's ranch to help with chores on Mom and Dad's farm and to care for the three little siblings aged 12, 10, and 9.
I remember clearly thinking about how Brother had missed all the commotion of the eruption. He wrapped the drivers door of a 71 Torino around a power pole at 11:30 PM of Mother's Day on his way to work graveyard shift milking cows at a large dairy, apparently asleep at the wheel.
So each year we get a bit of a reminder.
And we even got a little ash down here in the Boise Valley.
