THE YELLOW PICKS
“He was never without a pocketful of guitar picks.”
I fell in love with my husband the first time he played for me. He was a guitarist, but in a nod to my Appalachian heritage, he played that first song on a mandolin: “Highwayman,” by the famed outlaw supergroup of nearly the same name, The Highwaymen. Paul especially loved the Johnny Cash verse, envisioning Johnny in a coked-out frenzy, stumbling onstage to mumble, “I fly a starship / Across the Universe divide...” The verse continues: “And when I reach the other side / I’ll find a place to rest my spirit if I can / Perhaps I may become a highwayman again / Or I may simply be a single drop of rain / But I will remain / And I’ll be back again...”
We’d met on the internet, and I suppose on paper we didn’t make the most sense as a couple. He was seven years older, a sometimes arrogantly brilliant historian, outdoorsy, musical, a religiously lapsed but culturally aligned Mormon from northern Utah who’d relocated to West Virginia after both his academic career and a previous marriage fell apart. Raised in the coalfields of eastern Kentucky, I spent more time on the porch swing than in the woods, couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket with a lid, and though I might have been the smart girl in my tiny town, couldn’t hold a candle to Paul’s self-assured intellect.
We fell for each other quickly, though, bonding over a love of books (although almost never the same ones), travel (he proposed on a dock in Sweden), and the rugged and mountainous landscape we chose to call home. There’s a line in the novel Memoirs of a Geisha (a favorite of mine that he never read): "He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.” That’s how it felt to find Paul.
He got sick in the spring of 2021. He’d been diagnosed with an autoimmune form of spinal arthritis almost a decade earlier and had likely developed Crohn’s disease, but he didn’t deal well with physical limitations and refused to cancel that year’s trip out West. He was so strong and fit and vital that we never realized he’d also developed the heart disease to which he was genetically predisposed. Heart failure is what killed him. After a day of climbing with his friends, he went back to his camper for a nap and was found several hours later when he failed to return to his friend’s house.
Our little dog, Meadow, who thought the sun rose and set on Paul, was with him; Our little dog, Meadow, who thought the sun rose and set on Paul, was with him; the fact that she wasn’t upset when they were found assures us his death was peaceful. He went out on his own terms, in his sleep, knowing he was cherished in this world. That gives me comfort now, but at the time—less than six years after we met, only weeks past our third wedding anniversary—I felt severed. I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye. I got Paul back in a box of ashes delivered in the mail. I grieved the loss of the sound he’d brought to my life, the fact that I’d never again fall asleep tracing the lines and crags of his hand with my thumb.
I loved those hands. They were a rock climber's hands, knuckles knobby, nails dented and dinged, imperfections that were a song of their own, written while climbing the splitter handcracks of his beloved desert Southwest. But they were also the delicate hands of an accomplished jazz guitarist. Paul played gigs in our adopted town of Fayetteville, wearing a fedora and a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. He was never without a pocketful of guitar picks.
So when the dryer started rattling the week of his memorial service, three months after he died, and the bemused repairman presented me with a handful of Paul’s favorite yellow picks, I knew my husband was somewhere writing his verse of “Highwayman” and those picks were his drop of rain. I’ve never been particularly sentimental or mystical and Paul certainly wasn’t, but I know the picks were a message, just for me, at a time when I especially needed to hear his voice. The message I heard as the picks plinked into my hand was this: “Hi, love. There’s music here. There’s music everywhere.”
—Miranda Nelson
Miranda Nelson is a banker living in Fayetteville, WV. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Spalding University and spends her free time baking, reading and hiking with her dog, Meadow, and her partner, Chris, in New River Gorge National Park.