What a rotten fucking day.
Oh great, my sister has a tumor the size of a cantelope. I felt like pouring Drano on my Cheerios, but instead I took a nap. When I woke up, I remembered it wasn’t about me, and that T. would beat me silly if she caught me going off and had the strength. What an incredible sister. What an incredible world.
Toward evening a beautiful woman bearing roast organic chicken, baked beans, slaw, and root beer had me drive down to the Rio Grande just north of Pilar. As you can see, the traffic and crowds were terrible. Still, the air felt like blessings, and the breeze, full of cottonwood seeds, carried a heavy scent of whatever was blooming along the bank—it smelled like talcum powder and grandmother’s house. We had a lovely meal, and I didn’t swat a single bug. (At another spot down the road, I stopped to take a picture and something stung me inside my Crocs, but things could have been worse.)
The river was magnificent and never out of earshot, gurgling low in the wide, flat stretches and roaring crisply over the rocks. The yellow light of evening warmed the colors on the cliffs that towered overhead. Just lift your eyes and focus on the rim: at least a thousand little caves, and who knew what was in them? Guano, nests, a pile of bones, a rattlesnake, an ancient shaman’s cache… You could spend a hundred lifetimes just exploring. Absolutely goddamn beautiful.
As my wife was cleaning up, she eyed me warily to ask if I was “antsy.” I assured her I was not, and it was true. I didn’t want to recognize time. Stop every thought, let the moment expand to fill the whole damn canyon and the void inside my soul. I knew wasn’t getting out of this alive, and so I’d better take it with me.
Clever, how they set that up.
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