Karolyn and I met in the boiler room of a tenement building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I was in the boiler fixing the boiler and she wanted to know when it was going to be back on. After a brief period of getting to know each other which involved a lot of time in bed with the occasional enjoined falling out of bed. We started our life together, buying a car for $300, driving it to her parents in El Paso to spend the next two months trekking thru Central America. We returned to the lower east side where we were active in saving 254 E 7th St. a tenement building that had been severely neglected to the point that it was deemed uninhabitable by the City of NY. The lower east side was quite vibrant with dancing on the roof tops that lasted until dawn. To support ourselves Karolyn went to work for Scholastic Magazine and I to DL Litter, a paint and coating testing lab. NY became too crowded for us so we started to plan our escape. We developed fly camping. We would pack some boxes with camping gear, a few clothes and fly to places that we thought we could move, all warmer than NY and close to good scuba diving. The South was eliminated because of the Bible Belt. Texas was off our list. It was too small, her parents lived there. New Mexico was too close to Texas, the West Coast too expensive that left us with Arizona. It was defiantly warmer than NY and only a few hundred miles from the Sea of Cortez or the Pacific. Karolyn immediately became involved with Native Seed Search, an organization dedicated to preserving the native seeds of the Southwest. There she established a farm collective between the Hopi, the O’odham, the Zuni, and the Navajo. In her altruistic way, established the communication avenues then left it up to the people in the tribes to maintain them. Karolyn worked as an adjunct for Pima Community College teaching Botany and Marine Sciences before landing a job as a teacher at the Biosphere in Oracle. There she showed students from Columbia University with there sister colleges the ecology and geology of the southwest and how it relates to the rest of the world. Life was good. We were always searching trying new things, learning about ourselves both as individuals and as a team. Our search led us to Freyburg, TX where we found that place that special place that called to us. It was 72 acres of overgrazed chemically abused range land with water bubbling out of the ground from a natural spring. Karolyn and I started on restoring it, removing the cattle, attacking the invasive species, tallowood trees, Johnson grass, thistles, burrs and anything else not native to this part of Texas, even trying a summer burn to get rid of the KR bluestem. This is Karolyn’s dream. A dream she will not see the completion of. I miss her terribly as we all will. There will be Memorial services for Karolyn sometime in the future. In her memory donation can be made in her name to: Arizona Native Plant Society, Tucson Chapter Carianne Campbell csfunicelli@gmail.com Casa de la Luz Foundation, Hospice Care http://www.casafoundation.org/donations.html Sky Island Alliance http://www.skyislandalliance.org/home.htm CEDO, marine studies in the Sea of Cortez http://www.cedointercultural.org/ Community Food Bank, Tucson, AZ. http://communityfoodbank.com/