We stayed in Aransas Pass for 3 weeks. Long enough to be familiar with restaurants, roadways, signs, statues, a cemetery, the library, the green pawnshop and Diva Hair Salon, the entrance to Portobelo Mobile Home and RV Park. It was long enough to send out the shallowest of roots. Fragile, unintended, yet real enough to feel something related to sadness as we pulled away.
The urge is strong to name the people I've met who have impressed or awed me, maybe by a strength and intelligence and a mobility I find challenging to match. Maybe by courage in the face of a familiar sadness—the same sadness, courage and humor I saw in my father as he steadfastly visited my mother in her dementia and their first partings at night in over 50 years. Maybe by a vitality at 82 after years on the land, one of many generations of sophisticated multi-tasking farmer/ranchers.
An RV park has a subtle group personality when people have been coming for 13, or 8 or 2 years, and friends from the same town travel together, and others live there permanently. A stranger sinks a little into the texture of the whole, or leans against it for awhile. It's not an embrace. Sometimes it's a welcome that is frankly curious, but respectful of privacy. Sometimes it's a nod and a smile. Often there's an expectation—that's your husband out there with the two white dogs? We're all in this kind of lifestyle together. We have to maintain the rig, pick up after the dog, do the laundry, try to get exercise, figure out how to get our mail and our meds. And always, the propane for heat, cooking and refrigeration on the road.
For years, I've been especially aware of the fullness of the single moment of a life, witnessed in passing, lasting seconds. How an entire lifetime is sensed and compressed. Or decompressed from that one moment.
Now, I'm feeling the tangle of all the people I've seen walking, or talked with, gazed at—under the same sun on ordered lots with paved avenues of palm trees and dry briar-filled grass. There was the gulf coast. Then the drive up to Boerne, Texas, overnighting on a hilltop. A night in a sixties modern graveled park in Ozona, Texas. On to Pecos, where I found conversations with Charlie and Marjorie stimulating and enlightening. But Texas is behind us.
Tonight, we're in Roswell, New Mexico. It felt as if the landscape changed at the border. Lately, the mornings are cold, the days grow hot. Just before the sun began to sink, I reveled in its strong light on everything around me. I walked Sam, who at times will trot briskly beside me, nose up, happy to move. But he is a rapt sniffer, and there are the times when he slows, head lowered, then pulls me to a stop, his nose touching the ground while he sniffs and sniffs until I feel his trembling through the leash. Maybe that's how I feel, moving, stopping, sniffing out traces of lives, hearing stories, looking into the eyes of familiar strangers. Trembling inside. Then we pull away.
The shell shop in Aransas Pass
The Women's Club statue in Aransas Pass
At the cemetery in Rockport
Signs of oil from the Gulf to Roswell, here, outside Corpus Christi
Dawn, in Boerne Texas
RV park in Ozona, Texas
The urge is strong to name the people I've met who have impressed or awed me, maybe by a strength and intelligence and a mobility I find challenging to match. Maybe by courage in the face of a familiar sadness—the same sadness, courage and humor I saw in my father as he steadfastly visited my mother in her dementia and their first partings at night in over 50 years. Maybe by a vitality at 82 after years on the land, one of many generations of sophisticated multi-tasking farmer/ranchers.
An RV park has a subtle group personality when people have been coming for 13, or 8 or 2 years, and friends from the same town travel together, and others live there permanently. A stranger sinks a little into the texture of the whole, or leans against it for awhile. It's not an embrace. Sometimes it's a welcome that is frankly curious, but respectful of privacy. Sometimes it's a nod and a smile. Often there's an expectation—that's your husband out there with the two white dogs? We're all in this kind of lifestyle together. We have to maintain the rig, pick up after the dog, do the laundry, try to get exercise, figure out how to get our mail and our meds. And always, the propane for heat, cooking and refrigeration on the road.
For years, I've been especially aware of the fullness of the single moment of a life, witnessed in passing, lasting seconds. How an entire lifetime is sensed and compressed. Or decompressed from that one moment.
Now, I'm feeling the tangle of all the people I've seen walking, or talked with, gazed at—under the same sun on ordered lots with paved avenues of palm trees and dry briar-filled grass. There was the gulf coast. Then the drive up to Boerne, Texas, overnighting on a hilltop. A night in a sixties modern graveled park in Ozona, Texas. On to Pecos, where I found conversations with Charlie and Marjorie stimulating and enlightening. But Texas is behind us.
Tonight, we're in Roswell, New Mexico. It felt as if the landscape changed at the border. Lately, the mornings are cold, the days grow hot. Just before the sun began to sink, I reveled in its strong light on everything around me. I walked Sam, who at times will trot briskly beside me, nose up, happy to move. But he is a rapt sniffer, and there are the times when he slows, head lowered, then pulls me to a stop, his nose touching the ground while he sniffs and sniffs until I feel his trembling through the leash. Maybe that's how I feel, moving, stopping, sniffing out traces of lives, hearing stories, looking into the eyes of familiar strangers. Trembling inside. Then we pull away.
The shell shop in Aransas Pass
The Women's Club statue in Aransas Pass
At the cemetery in Rockport
Signs of oil from the Gulf to Roswell, here, outside Corpus Christi
Dawn, in Boerne Texas
RV park in Ozona, Texas
posted by Susan at 9:26 PM
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