Riding Amtrak’s Southwest Chief, the only train left that travels east and west across our country and down to New Orleans, I notice as we cross the desert in New Mexico the small forgotten places, little towns now shrunken, their old adobe houses crowded with house trailers, their streets unpaved and unlighted. I’m not sentimental about the hardship of lives here as our aquifer sinks and agriculture becomes impossible but I do have a sneaking admiration for the people, mostly old, who hang on, like the elders in Kiev who refuse their children’s pleas to flee.
There’s a hint of survival humor here, as in the figure perched above the SLOW sign on a dirt road. It’s a half-broken motorcycle rider, but he’s riding a tricycle.
The church in Lamy has been abandoned for years, there’s no grocery store or post office, no gas station; all those places used to serve to bring the people living there together, if only to share a nod and a smile. It’s only twenty miles from bustling Santa Fe where the population has doubled in twenty years, reaching 60,000, yet it’s possible to be a hermit here with a little income, driving to the Big City once a week for essential supplies.
I like this idea, as a writer who enjoyed the enforced stillness of the Covid lockdown; I’m struggling to adjust to increasing social demands, the friends surfacing, the trips calling—like this one to visit my son and his family in southern California.
But I know I wouldn’t be happy without a binding symbol like the Ashes to Go given last week on Ash Wednesday to a large group of happenstance passersby on the plaza in Santa Fe: a short prayer, the deacon’s thumb marking a dark cross on a stranger’s forehead and then, “From dust you were made, and to dust you will return…”
Ash Wednesday would have been my son Will‘s 52nd birthday if he had lived. Through grace I encountered a friend Thursday and asked her to tell me about a hike she and Will’s brother took him on into the mountains around Santa Fe. It was growing dark, turning colder, and beginning to snow, but when the others turned back to go to the car, Will refused to go saying, “I don’t want to go back.” He was entranced by the falling snow, gazing up into the flakes, reveling in being out in the wilderness, the only place he was at home.
Two years later, he didn’t go back to the car, freezing to death in a Colorado April blizzard. I hope then, too, he was staring up at the snowflakes in ectasy, exactly where he wanted to be.
This week, his two children and their mother with two old friends visited his grave on my farm east of Louisville, laying flowers beneath his simple wooden cross, carved with his name and dates and “Asleep in the arms of the Lord.”
Exactly where he wanted to be in the place he loved.
Brought a tear to my eye Sallie. Long live Will!
Dear Sallie. I am sorry to know that your son Will proceeded you in death in 2017. I am not a mother. I am a married woman who has horses and cats as companions. We expect to lose our pet companions. Folks don’t expect to lose a child to death before their death. Condolences for his passing away seven years ago. Blessed be.