Family

You Can Never Go Home Again

Happy New Year, you all. I hope your holidays were peaceful and gentle. We’ve moved around since I last wrote. In our final days in our last spot. Megan and I were having a peaceful conversation when we heard something screech to a halt behind us. I whipped around to a cloud of dust. I stood up and saw a javelina making tracks across the desert. I followed its prints across for a fair distance, through the sandy washes and around the bushes and cacti. She was fast so I didn’t catch another glimpse of her, just her hurried passage written in the sand. As I followed along I saw evidence of much rooting around this bush or that and older prints that wandered this way and that. I saw delicate bird prints in the washes, of who specifically, I couldn’t say. Eventually, I turned back and followed my own singular boot prints back to Megan and camp.

One afternoon a rancher came by our remote outpost in the valley surrounded by mountains on all side. He was a modern day cowboy, in a side-by-side, not on a horse. He stopped to ask us if we’d seen any cows. We had not. There was one lonesome cow track across camp, but it had been there when we arrived. He noticed Henry’s plates. He whistled low “you all are a long way from home.” He told us had been born in Boston. His family moved to Arizona when he was six. He said he remembered the cold, how it got into your bones. He said he and his family had gone back to visit his relatives. He remembered one specific time when he had gone to the bus stop with his aunt in the morning to wait with her children. He said he remembers his teeth chattering and his whole body convulsing from shivering in the morning cold. He said he aunt was wearing a dress and shivered not at all. He said he has thought, since that morning, that God used a different mold when he built people from New England. We chatted in the warm afternoon sun. When he left to renew his search for his wandering livestock, he asked where we would go next and wished us safe travels and warm afternoons. His words must have flown up out of the valley and above the mountains to God’s ears because all of our afternoon since then have been spent in warm sunshine, sometimes we even move to the shade that Henry provides.

We moved up in the Roofnest the day before we decided to leave that spot. It pleases my soul to see our site stripped down, just Henry and the chair and camp table. It’s so easy-looking, so needing-so-little-looking. Just Megan and me, Henry and the sky; it soothes that part of my soul that remains ever lonesome and free. We made coffee in the morning, closed the nest, and headed west. We spent the day exploring some conservation land. The dirt roads were wild with river crossings and washed out sections. The long prairie grasses stretched, golden, to purple mountain majesty.

Cows watched us from the hills, a herd of white-tailed deer stopped under the trees by the wash to watch us as we passed. We tried our best. We drove all the roads. But we didn’t like the area, as beautiful as it was, for camping. So I told Megan that I bet nobody was at our spot way down south along the border, down the scraggly two-track, through the deep sandy washes and pin-striping bushes. We pointed Henry south and west. We sat in Traffic in Tuscon. We watched one of the most magnificent sunsets as we drove through Tohono O’odham Nation.

Their nation holds as much land as the state of Connecticut. I felt small and ignorant as I had never heard of these people. I wish our education system was actually geared towards knowledge and not for making good workers. I wonder at a nation that doesn’t teach its full history, that doesn’t acknowledge the peoples who lived here for thousands of years. Of course, maybe it is just me. Maybe most people know about the history of the land and people in more than the broad way in which I know things. Maybe the ignorance is mine alone, but I don’t think so.

We found our spot down our scraggly two-track, empty as I had thought it would be. We set up the nest in the dark and wandered off to dreamland. One thing I love about us, is that there was no evidence a human had stayed here before. No sign of our last visit, no footprints and tire tracks left to mark our last stay here, all evidence erased by the wind and the rain. And I don’t think anyone else has discovered our secluded spot tucked between washes, surrounded by saguaro, teddy bear chollas and Palo Verde trees. We set up the Springbar tent and spent the day reacquainting ourselves with the area. Megan decorated the tent for Christmas. She cut out snowflakes. My goddaughter had gifted me with a Nabbit (from Mario) figurine and a Bigfoot. We hung those among the snowflakes. We dressed up in our ‘fancy’ clothes for Christmas day. We baked a ham in the camp oven. I glazed it with maple syrup from home. I made some roast potatoes that might have been the best potatoes I’ve ever made, and that’s saying a lot as I make great potatoes in all kinds of ways.

I met a new type of woodpecker. I heard him chirping and followed the song until I spotted him on a saguaro. He is a Ladder-backed Woodpecker and I was happy to meet him. At night a Great Horned Owl speaks in his low voice from the Palo Verde in the wash. “Who? Who?” he asks. There are two ravens who fly overhead daily and some small song birds who keep out of sight but sing. One day on a hike we spotted a hawk circling overhead. We also flushed out a flock of Gambel’s Quail on that hike. Their wings a tremendous thunder as they flew up and resettled a short distance away. The hiking is spectacular here; we don’t have to get very far to have a completely new vantage point, to see the mountains from a different angle. We found a saguaro who looks like he’s thinking and two which have grown up together and they look like an old couple who are waving to us as we hike by.

The Thinker and old friendly couple.

My niece, Shanna got married. It was a small affair. I am, perhaps, a person who does not have healthy coping skills. For a decade or more, when most of us sisters lived in the same state, we’d gather weekly at my house. When all the children were small, it was every Saturday. I would feed everyone lunch and sometimes supper as well. Then as children got older and busier, we changed the meeting to Friday nights. People would come whenever and leave when they felt like it. Sometimes I made supper and sometimes it was just coffee and snacks. These were golden years. Years where I knew those babies as they grew, learned them as they gained this milestone or that in maturity. They hiked with me and built things for my house with me. We listened to music, had dance parties, shoveled snow together. We had pizza parties and played kick the can in the dark. They were my friends. All the memories, all the love. We scattered to the winds. But when I missed those times too much for my stunted emotional intellect to endure, I would tell myself a lie. I would say, these are short years, and some day, we’ll all be in the same spot again. We’ll be there again. But we can never go home again. And Shanna marrying has shattered my lie. Now, one is so grown, she has her own home and family. We can never go back again. I really struggled out here with the birds and cacti with my shattered soothing lie. Of course, I have known, intellectually, that things only move in one direction, life changes, babies grow- they’d have their jobs and their own social life outside of the old aunties even if we had remained in the same physical area. But I could pretend. I don’t actually wish to be living a different life. But, My Sisters, those memories with you and your children, those Saturdays, those Friday nights and random times in between, when I think about them, they are enshrined in gold. In my mind, a warm light, like sunshine, illuminates those memories and I feel a peaceful easy feeling. I can never thank you enough for being my family, for being my friends, for sharing with me your wonderful small humans growing into adults. Thank you for time, for my brain being full of golden light. You have filled my life with grace and love. You have helped me to be soft when it would be easy to be hard.

Nema: book club president, mate to my soul.

We have started a book club with Nema. We video call on Saturdays. We are reading Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. My world is being rocked. Megan and I are listening to the audiobook. We listen to two essays a week. We have to force ourselves to not go on ahead. We listen with our morning coffee. I am made emotional with the way Kimmerer weaves her words, chills rising, first on my arms and then across my chest, up to the lump in my throat. We barely remember to drink our coffee we are so transfixed by the poetry in her words. In many places I am reminded of my own childhood. I knew where the wild strawberries grew, when they would ripen in June. I remember the plump, ripe backberries, their juice staining our chins as we picked them with hands still wet from swimming under a fading summer sun. I think about snowshoeing with my dad; his long stride packing a path before me in the snow, up over the hill through the woods, across the frozen lake and back into the woods. He would wait for my small legs to catch up, our breath clouding out into the cold air. He would point out a special tree or the tracks of small rodents or birds in the sky. We look forward to Saturday nights like children waiting for Christmas morning. We can’t wait to catch up with Nema and find out what she thought about the new essays we’ve read. Nema is the mate to my soul. We don’t need anything more to be close, but this is another strand of gold weaving into the fabric of my memories. While we listen to the book, Nema is with me. I am also reminded of my mom and dad often. This book is knitting me closer to them as well, even if they don’t know it. What a magical spell for a book to weave. How utterly devastatingly beautiful is the written word.

First Day Hike selfie.

“I wonder sometimes where we finally go,

chances are I’ll never know...

...some things never change

and you can never go home again” – Martha Davis

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