I may have been thinking about the closing of offices in the unique village of Gove, where there is no new IHOP nor Motel 8 - but neighbors worth more than either when it comes down to it. In truth I cannot remember what journey my mind had been on when I heard and looked up to see Floyd Van Loenen's red pickup crunching the gravel, coming my way.

Floyd, his wife Liz, and their kids we have known since Better Half and I arrived with our two girls - although technically our youngest rode here in her mother's womb.

Beside Floyd sat Lee Anderson, a neighbor way across town - some three blocks by crow flight. Lee and his wife Jean are newcomers, Boguians for a scant seven years or so. But from day one, everybody in town learned their first names and where they lived.

As the pickup passed, Floyd and Lee waved. Small town folks do that almost without thinking, but I know they recognized me, even bundled and hooded in my old winter coat. Behind the pickup, on a trailer, came the backhoe with which Floyd's skill is legendary. A couple of hundred yards behind came Floyd's son Bryan in the old farm dump truck. Big smile. Big, big wave.

I remember six or seven-year-old Bryan coming across the street a few days after we moved here in the fall of 1963. I was painting. The towhead studied me and my work quietly for a minute or so, then announced with authority, "My dad can put you in jail."

His father was then serving a stint as city cop. I had been put on notice.

This day Floyd, Lee, and Bryan were on their way to Morlan Cemetery south of the Red Line road to dig a grave for Betty Smith. The backhoe to carve out a hole, the truck to hold the refill dirt in abeyance until the few mourners left the cemetery.

Betty had lived in a historic limestone house nine miles south of Bogue. Historic, because in the earliest days of settlement on these plains, sod was the most available building material. Limestone was next. Wood, there was not much. My good friend Len Schamber from Damar helped Betty repair and renovate her home several years back.

Bryan also lives in a limestone house on the edge of town. Before him a wirey, crusty little bachelor, Alfred Brault, lived there. Alfred advised me when I over-hauled my '54 Ford. I don't know who built the house. My uncle James Monroe Austin, who came hereabouts in 1872 with Buffalo Bill Cody, was also a stonemason. Just maybe Uncle Jimmy had a hand in Betty's or Bryan's house. Probably not.

Better Half and I knew Betty not intimately, but fairly well. Her husband Ray died some time ago. She came often to the small Bogue bank where Better Half worked, and visited the county library where I worked. Once she donated a sack of books she had read or outgrown, mostly on the religious side. Betty was a good woman, salt of the earth. When she went to church, it was usually the Red Line Church of God. Many of our friends and neighbors go there. We know her pastor Ron Fontenot, a Louisiana Cajun transplant. Pastor Ron helped judge the Christmas lights at Damar.

Years back, I remember Betty and others from her congregation sitting with our United Methodists one evening to hear writer and philosopher Wes Jackson lament the demise of small town, small farm America and the slow death of truly inter-connected communities. Instead we see the concentration of ever more transient populations whose allegiance to the glitter of money is winning by cold, narrow efficiency. Just what it wins is another matter.

Perhaps it is all rough justice. Our forefathers, Wes said, saw our native Americans as boulders in the road to progress and shoved them rudely off the land. Today those of us in towns like Bogue and Gove and on family farms and in mom and pop businesses are the boulders.

Goodbye, Betty. We'll miss you among us.