But then I thought, what the heck? You’ve had 75 pretty good years, your life insurance is paid up, and you don’t owe anybody any money at the moment. Plus, you’ve been wanting to get back out to the ranch where you worked a couple of summers almost 60 years ago. Let’s go!

So on Maundy Thursday morning we putted through rush-hour traffic out to I-20, skirted Dallas a couple of hours later, and stopped in Fort Worth, where my son had to speak to a roomful of heating and air-conditioning contractors about the virtues of his company’s new products. The kid is good! He clearly knows what he’s talking about. I’ll cheerfully admit I understood barely a sentence of the jargon that went down during the two-hour meeting – government energy-saving tax credits, CFMs, and heat pumps – so I sat quietly near the back of the room and surreptitiously read the latest about the search for the lost ships of the 1845 Franklin expedition.

At noon it was off west again, through slowly rising land. Turkey vultures overhead everywhere. The GPS mounted above the dashboard kept track of the altitude gain. Gradually I began to recognize old names, remembered from almost a lifetime ago – Cisco, Cross Plains, Cross Cut. Headed south from Cisco, we stopped at a crossroads to pick up some whiskey, and I remembered something I’d forgotten: These are all dry counties. Any beer? I asked. Huh-uh. We settled for a six-pack of Dr. Pepper and a roll of sausage and drove on south.

I wanted to see if there’d be any remaining evidence of the devastating fires that whipped through Cross Plains two days after Christmas in 2005 and destroyed over 100 houses. There was, lots of it – blackened brush and trees bravely budding; new and unfinished houses on both sides of the road at the north end of town. The life-size statue of a bison outside the school looked a little scorched. But the town looks otherwise unruffled five years after its total evacuation.

Cross Cut, a few miles farther south, is bypassed by the highway. We didn’t go look; it’s pretty much abandoned. School and post office gone,, surrounding ranches going back to mesquite and leased out to hunters in season for deer, turkey, and wild pigs. The Cross Cut oil field, which kept things going around there for decades, is now officially abandoned and quiet.

Just south of Cross Cut the Pecan Bayou, brown as coffee with cream, flows sluggishly under the highway and wanders southeast toward Lake Brownwood, a Depression-era CCC project. We were at the ranch at last. We found the house where we’d be staying, chatted a bit, and took a ride over to the old part of the place. The house was gone, burned in a fire many years ago, but I was tickled to see that a pole barn I’d helped move in the early 50s was still standing. It hasn’t got long to go – one corner is collapsing – but what a day that had been, moving a pole barn with a tractor! It staggered across the yard like a wounded diplodocus, but it made it.

We used to set trot lines in the bayou, their multiple hooks baited with grisly offal seasoned in a foul-smelling Mason jar. I always swam across with the far end of the line. The first time we took it up next morning, the old man told me to be sure to keep it taut on my end. When he pulled it up the bank on his side, I saw why. There were half a dozen beautiful channel cats, but also three snapping turtles and a very large, dead snake, as well. Not quite like fly fishing for brook trout.

A cold front rumbled through that night with high wind and heavy rain showers. Next morning after breakfast we loaded the car and traveled, as if through time, back to the bustle and roar of Dallas and Tyler. It was Good Friday, and we’d been given to understand that, saddlesore and dusty as we might be, we were joining the ladies for tenebrae at church that evening.

It’s difficult for us northern New Englanders to appreciate what a packed church is. We don’t pack them very often; and even when we do, it amounts to maybe a hundred people. That evening, the First Presbyterian Church of Tyler – a relatively staid operation as Southern churches go – was packed with about 500 Presbyterians (and two Episcopalians).

Tenebrae (“darkness”) commemorates the period of Holy Week between the crucifixion and resurrection. The service that evening was musical, with a chamber orchestra and choir performing something I’d never heard before, the beautiful “Seven Last Words of Christ” by Théodore Dubois. As each piece ended, a set of window blinds was slammed shut and one of the seven candles at the head of the aisle was extinguished. A very moving service.

Saturday was chillin’-at-the-lake day. Our younger granddaughter and two pals went to sea in a battered paddleboat, and just offshore discovered they were sharing the vessel with several agitated spiders. Sounded like an ax murder out there.

It’s Easter evening now, and I’m beginning to yearn for cool Vermont nights and mornings. It’s nice to be warm once in a while, I guess, and it’s been wonderful to visit the family and the old ranch But I need to get back and see if the snow’s gone yet from the top of Spruce Mountain.