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PICT0359In Texas, I get lost. 

Two lane roads open into four lane highways, and concrete consumes old pastures. Overpasses pile up like skyscrapers, and I grow restless behind the wheel of a borrowed car. Everything has changed.

I ride the freeways like a foreigner, holding my breath and missing my exits and circling the city until I find something familiar. Something constant.

The cemetery where my mother is buried. The houses where I grew up. The road to my Uncle’s home–as it rises and falls–on the way to celebrate my grandmother’s birthday.

I get lost in these images.

Then later, with a warm afternoon breeze on my face, the sound of cicadas send out their call in waves, like a radar. And I think, This is what it means to be home, the pull of memory: of easy conversations with my cousins, my sisters, my father, our time apart irrelevant; the feel of my grandmother’s hand in mine, her skin worn and fragile after 90 years but her spirit strong.

I carry all of this with me into the next morning as I board a plane before sunrise, hold tight each moment for several days after. For as long as I can, because I know it may be a year before I return.

Before I get lost again.

My View from Here

This week, I am vacationing off the beaten path, traveling the slow road with the family through lower Michigan and across the bridge and finally ending up here:

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I’m not entirely disconnected from technology, but distanced enough to keep me grounded in the moment, not caught up in what I’m missing. With that in mind, I doubt much writing will get done this week. It seems natural (and necessary) to let deadlines go, to rest a bit, to just be.

If the itch strikes, write. If not? Well, then….

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life…being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that. ~Alice Walker

 

Writer Incognito

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I may be sunning, but I’m writing just the same (thought by thought, word by word).

Where are you writing today?

Photo courtesy of V.M.