Home
by GrowingFlowers
We’re home. It was an underestimated and long drive home – sticky, sweaty and breathtakingly beautiful in some areas.
We drove some smaller roads through the Mohave desert – dusty, quiet and super hot towns in the desert. The REAL desert. Dirt and no vegetation. Dusty colored houses, serious poverty too. Lots of trailers, no trees. Billboards. Heat. The people seemed different to me. Conservative, mainstream America. Not the familiar culture of Santa Cruz or Taos. I know they are out there, I even have some of them as “friends” on facebook – but I forget about that side of America. The shopping side.
We finally made it to Interstate 40 – the long highway from East to West – the fast one. Although we could drive 75-80mph on this highway it seemed to me that we moved slower than we ever had before. The end was monotonous. We were stuck in traffic for awhile behind an old cherokee jeep with a rubbermaid full of puppies. We heard them barking – squeaking really. Every once in awhile one would pop up and we would see its eyes and ears.
We ate a lot of snacks. We drove, we drank water -and then had to stop often!
And we went to Joshua Tree National Park. My god! Falko and I hadn’t been there for 15 years. We had gone there when Treska was a bit older than a year during a visit to the States. We were trying to conceive Kaya there in the Mohave desert. We did conceive, but later miscarried. A good thing too, otherwise we wouldn’t have Kaya right now.
I love Joshua Tree. With my entire heart and soul.
We got there right as the sun was beginning to go down. It was the best time and the worst time. The light was phenomenal, a beauty that hurt my heart. I needed to consume it somehow, but couldn’t. The worst time, because I knew when the sun went down, there would only be a few more minutes to enjoy the spectacular sites. I rushed forward to take photos and to actively enjoy it. Over and over again. We walked, we sat, we drove – we chased those trees down. I was overwhelmed.
And then we drove on. We drove through the night, the road was good, I couldn’t even imagine what the landscape looked like. We pulled into a tiny, tiny and strange town on the border of Arizona. Drove over the Colorado River and headed to the only normal appearing hotel. It was booked. We ended up staying at a small, Indian owned, budget motel that totally did the trick. The air conditioner hummed and clanked all night long trying to bring the temperature down to 76 in the room. It was 91 degrees at midnight! (117 degrees during the day!) It was a sticky kind of hot. We woke to the thunder crashing in the harsh cracking way at 4 am and we left to some humidity.
When we arrived in Taos, the air was cool and damp. It had rained a bunch while we were gone. The flowers were incredible and my home looked perfect. We walked into very excited dogs, clean floors, empty counters save a vase of red cut flowers our housesitter had left. All exactly as we had left it. Sparse! Open! Clean. Heaven.
Amazing to be home too. I am deeply grateful to love Taos this much, otherwise I would have had a very hard time leaving Santa Cruz. Good to be with my brother, with his girlfriend. Good to be with family. The ocean. The outdoors. To walk and walk and walk!
And so good to be home.
What??? You had a miscarriage???? You mean I could have been a granny three times over? Oh the things one learns on the web.