Whether I’m leaving on a short trip like this one or a long trip like the one next month, I feel the same mixture of nostalgia and apprehension: nostalgia for the beautiful world I’m leaving, apprehension about plunging back into the public world of blank faces, inexplicable delays, bad food, and the curious impersonality that has taken over, now that strangers seem afraid to speak, smile or even make eye contact.
But forget that for a moment. This beautiful world! Our old adobe houses, our shaded lanes, our gardens glimpsed over walls is the world of the transplanted and the rich; it was not always so. My eighty-year-old house was probably built by Spanish-speaking tradesmen; when we Anglos arrived and offered millions for their homes, they accepted the money and decamped to the soulless developments south of town. This seems a symbol of the changes that have taken over our world in the twenty-first century.
But their gardens remain, added to and embellished by us newcomers, the rows of vegetables replaced with perennial borders. I was just admiring a rank of daylilies reaching for the sun, a hummingbird whirling around in a fruitless search for nectar, a small yellow butterfly, not a Monarch, alas, flitting from yellow flower to yellow flower. These beings are surviving—at least for now—prolonged drought, commercial development, even fires, and they give me hope of developing the same persistent, uncomplaining strength.
And there are, still, moments of such human beauty! The man walking his two small dogs yesterday morning who tells me they “give him no peace” if he avoids their expected four mile walk, the women taking off their shoes to wade in the tiny Santa Fe River, a creek anywhere else, and a blessing when water is released from the reservoir to fill it, the man dandling his infant in my neighborhood park who smiled encouragingly as I crawled up the bank from the river, the circle of twelve or fifteen people, sitting cross-legged in silence under a big cottonwood, meditating.
Above all there is for me the blessings of my readers. Now whenever I read and discuss Little Brother, I receive a note from a stranger in my audience, telling me the book means something to her. This is happening more frequently with this memoir, perhaps because it treats of sadness and death. I am astonished and consider it a miracle that people still want to hear, buy and read my latest book—my sixteenth!—as the world seems to lurch in an unexpected direction and many of us beset by worries and fears.
But—we share them. They belong to all of us, as do the Daylilies parading along the wall in my garden.
These observations and reflections are beautiful!!!!
I shared this with several friends who are also members of the Worcester Garden Club. Lovely!