The Desert Has Mercy

Last night we got back into town from ten days being away. We were up in Colorado for what has become an annual gathering of the family in Estes Park, which is not far from where my sisters live with their family, and where we all grew up.

This year was poignant in that as part of the visit, we put mom's ashes in the memorial wall at that the camp Columbarium, as they call it. We did on the second full day. I met my sisters in the office next to Columbarium at ten that morning. The woman there had the new plaque ready, with my mom's name and vital dates next to my dad's, which were on the old plaque.

That evening my sister's asked me about the place where I had scattered some of mom's ashes during our trip to France, which we had taken in April. I told them that I had carried them (in the little purse Kate made for them, also with a little bit of dad's ashes too) with me in the basket of the bicycle as we went across Brittany and Normandy. I told them it had been beautiful and sunny the entire way. Even the locals were marveling at the weather for that time of year. So many twists of the paths along the sea were achingly beautiful. Yellow rape flower across the green lush fields. Cows at every turn. I mooed at nearly all of them along the way. I wound up saving the scattering until we got to Omaha Beach, where on the only grey day of the entire trip, I  through them out in the lapping surf.

Colorado felt especially healing this time because I could walk out into the pines and sit beside rushing water in the streams that come down off the glaciers. In the desert I miss that forest cover, and the rushing of water.

Last night a couple hours after we got back, and just after dark, an intense nasty storm cell came over us from the northeast, part of the monsoon counter-cycle coming down off the rim, where we had just come from. It started as an intense storm that send the trees into torments, backlit by the motion-activated flood lights from the woman next door, down the hill from us. Then the rains came hard and dumped several inches until it ran in a steady cascade from the roof onto the rocks and cacti. Standing below it, it sounded not unlike a mountain stream.