I walked across the Ed Gulley Memorial Bridge yesterday for the first time since Ed died last August. This bridge – Ed put it together in about five minutes – is tough, like he was.

It has withstood a lot of snow, ice and serious flooding. I trust it, it’s a solid bridge. Ed wanted us to have a path into our woods, I am grateful to him for that and other things.

He asked me why I called it the Ed Gulley Memorial Bridge, and I said it was because people would remember it when he died, and nobody would ever build an Gulley museum. I had no idea.

Ed was a skilled and confident and experienced man, he knew the earth and the animal world and every machine there ever was. Since I don’t know those things, and I knew some things he didn’t know, we appreciated each other. We each filled in the holes in the other.

I was a bit selfish about Ed, I think.

I also miss the sense that someone that strong and competent stood behind me always ready to help in the event of trouble or disaster. I will not forget the night the big bear was hit by a truck in front of our  farmhouse and crawled into our pasture.

The police came and shot him, and Ed took  him home to skin him. He always seemed to know what I needed and he had this habit of showing up without  being asked. He was never at a loss about what to do. He told me he could never imagine how I could write all the time.

The bridge got me to thinking, as Ed often did about life, and today, sitting on our new/old back porch like some old fart in the town square, I thought about some of the secrets of life that Ed and I talked about while he was dying.

He asked me to visit him every day, needed to talk. I know he hoped I would write a book about him, but he laughed when I told him  this was American publishing, he wasn’t Winston Churchill or a cute dog, my publisher would never go for a book about him, and I would not survive listening to him that much or for that long.

He just laughed and said I was missing a big opportunity to be rich and famous. Ed was like that, he thought he was worth his weight in platinum,  he was never plagued with self-doubt, his ego made him charismatic and larger than life because it was.

We could say anything to one another, and did, and how often do you have a friend like that?

I miss Ed, and I miss the time I spent with him and his family.  He hoped and I hoped I would be helpful to them after he died, but I think as I look back that Ed was really the only one in the household who was easy around me, or who really wanted me around.

I often asked him if he really wanted me there, and he was adamant that he did, and he wanted me to write about him every day, which I tried to do. He wanted to be remembered.

I think I failed him on the family thing, I have hardly heard a thing from them since he died, and I hope they are healing and moving forward.

People feel safest within their tribes, I think.

I don’t have a tribe, so I have to guess at that. There is perhaps something wrong with me, but I rarely grieve over loss or death, human or canine. The Quakers taught me to celebrate life, not mourn death. They taught me that death was not an interruption of life, but was life itself.

I don’t know how that would stand up if I lost Maria. I hope I would celebrate her life too.

But that idea stuck, I took it in. Still, I would love to have Ed around to watch my back on the farm, or to wonder at the mysteries of the world. The farm can be a lonely and scary place sometimes. Ed always made it feel safer.

Ed asked me one afternoon as I said next to his bed early on in his cancer what my solution to the problem of life was. It was a big question, and I said it was over my head,  but he really wanted an answer, and under the circumstances, I thought he deserved one.

He thought I might have to answers to some of these questions. I thought he did. So I thought about it and came back with answer. My friend Paul Moshimer always told me I was a truth-teller, but I thought I was just another boob wandering on the path.

I said to Ed that I thought the solution to life was simple. It was life itself. A good life, I said, was not achieved by arguing or reasoning  or thumb-sucking. A good life was achieved by living.

Until we have learned how to live, I said, our purpose for being here had nothing to work on or build on.  And until we failed, again and again, we had no way of figuring out what success was. And what truth was.

Ed loved that answer and asked me to repeat it a dozen times, until he could no longer remember that we had the conversation.

Looking at that bridge he decided to build for us, I thought I had to give Ed one thing. He lived, he solved the problem of life by first of all, living. He pulled calves out of their mothers backside like I move a cereal box.

I’m trying to do the same thing.  I’m trying to first of all live.

Hey there, Ed, I picture you up there somewhere talking the angels ears off. Thanks for the bridge.