12/25/2023

Travel changes time. It is Sunday. On Wednesday, we were at home in Iowa, packing and preparing to be gone. The twenty-four hours of driving was a peaceful grind. We have made this trek so many times now. And yet the evolution of the landscape from midwestern to southwestern never stops being wondrous.

We can’t take my preferred route through the mountains on the last leg due to a winter storm. But when we stop for gas south of Albuquerque, the scent of damp creosote hits me in that way only an old, familiar smell can manage.

For a moment, I am overrun by the tenuous yet powerful sense of a former self. The things I did in air that carried the scent of the desert shift and swarm and jostle, trying to return. So many loves and losses. So much solitude. The memories are murky now. But their imprint remains. It is hard to imagine who I might be now if I hadn’t spent so much time alone in a vast, wild landscape with only a horse for company.