Let's hear it for the nuclear family
We’ve got a long drive tomorrow - we’re in Taos tonight, at the truly delightful El Pueblo Lodge (Thank you Tripadvisor.com!), and we need to get to Wichita tomorrow. This will involve some hard driving - up to Raton Pass and clipping a corner of Colorado before entering Kansas. However, we get to skip Texas and Oklahoma completely. This pleases me. But it does mean an early bedtime.
We actually spent an entire day in the same state! Not bliss - that’s been ongoing - but New Mexico. We met my other sister and her husband in Albuquerque for brunch, then headed up through Santa Fe to Los Alamos, where I grew up. I drove around and reminisced madly, showed Missy my old haunts and the house we lived in, and ended with a short visit to the Science Museum.
When we stopped at my old home, while I was standing on the sidewalk looking and musing, the current owner came out and asked what I was doing. When I introduced myself and said that I’d grown up there, she welcomed me and let me walk around the backyard, and showed me the work they were doing on the kitchen! My mother always wanted a larger kitchen. She would have approved.
It was lovely seeing the place. Much, much harder was seeing the hills around Los Alamos - the place was hit by a forest fire, the Cerro Grande fire, in 2000. I had followed the news and I knew which parts of the town had been lost - but it hadn’t sunk in that the hills that formed the green wall of my childhood home are now denuded, reduced to auburn patches of recovering scrub with occasional black spikes of dead pines.
That was hard. I’m deeply grateful that Missy was with me when I saw it.
We left town a bit after sunset, and stopped in Taos. We also stopped briefly en route, pulling off the road in one of the many turns and loops that put you out of sight of any direct artificial light source. Missy and I got out so she could look up. It was full dark, and it was finally actually clear, and she got to see the stars in the high desert at night.
We only looked for a few minutes before we shivered back into the car. But even a few minutes of that glory is a fine thing indeed.
We actually spent an entire day in the same state! Not bliss - that’s been ongoing - but New Mexico. We met my other sister and her husband in Albuquerque for brunch, then headed up through Santa Fe to Los Alamos, where I grew up. I drove around and reminisced madly, showed Missy my old haunts and the house we lived in, and ended with a short visit to the Science Museum.
When we stopped at my old home, while I was standing on the sidewalk looking and musing, the current owner came out and asked what I was doing. When I introduced myself and said that I’d grown up there, she welcomed me and let me walk around the backyard, and showed me the work they were doing on the kitchen! My mother always wanted a larger kitchen. She would have approved.
It was lovely seeing the place. Much, much harder was seeing the hills around Los Alamos - the place was hit by a forest fire, the Cerro Grande fire, in 2000. I had followed the news and I knew which parts of the town had been lost - but it hadn’t sunk in that the hills that formed the green wall of my childhood home are now denuded, reduced to auburn patches of recovering scrub with occasional black spikes of dead pines.
That was hard. I’m deeply grateful that Missy was with me when I saw it.
We left town a bit after sunset, and stopped in Taos. We also stopped briefly en route, pulling off the road in one of the many turns and loops that put you out of sight of any direct artificial light source. Missy and I got out so she could look up. It was full dark, and it was finally actually clear, and she got to see the stars in the high desert at night.
We only looked for a few minutes before we shivered back into the car. But even a few minutes of that glory is a fine thing indeed.