Monday, August 15, 4:30 PM. Brewer.

I picked up a copy of A Family Farmer’s Country Almanac at the library last week. It has charts on the phases of the moon and when to plant and harvest. It purports to tell the weather way out in advance. I took enough science in college to have my doubts, but who knows? We’ll see how it does. There’s a recipe section and something on home remedies. It’s gone from being a quaint, irrelevant curiosity to a physical artifact of how we are starting to live. Its antique yellow cover, with its sheafs and ivy and harvest moon, is comforting somehow. I have a feeling I’m going to be spending a lot of time with it.

For the last few days I’ve been thinking: before we do a cursory sweep of the whole country we ought to do a thorough sweep of the metroplex. There’s no sense driving 8,000 miles to look for people when they might be right under our noses. In the last week I’ve been up to Dallas and back several times. I’ve searched the Charlottesville area plenty. But who’s to say there isn’t another family on the other side of town, or over in Fort Worth?

So today we did some exploring. I took Claire and Trevor with me. It was time they got out and saw the city, and good to have some extra pairs of eyes.

We started near downtown and spiraled outward, using the loops mostly. Claire looked out one side of the car and Trevor the other, watching for movement, smoke, a sign, anything.

We also left some signs ourselves, painting directions in the middle of the big freeways for how we could be found. I didn’t tell where we are exactly or even what town we’re in. Maybe I’m being paranoid or maybe it’s watching too many movies but I don’t see why I ought to assume that anybody we meet would be friendly. Instead I described how to find a message box that I’ve set up by Dallas City Hall, downtown. If anybody’s around and sees those signs they can leave something for me there and we can arrange to meet. I’ll check it from time to time.

We got up as far as Plano and down as far as Duncanville. It was good to be with the little ones. They are full of hurts, and full of hopes, and out on the road we were able to talk about things we maybe wouldn’t at home. But they were pretty bored after four hours, and we came on back home.

I’ll head out again tomorrow. I have a feeling there may be somebody in the frou-frou suburbs up north.