No llores, mi querida
Dios nos vigila
Soon the horse will take us to Durango
If it hadn’t been for Durango, we could have done the whole 30-day trip without renting a car. Amtrak, Amtrak, why hast thou forsaken us? But we did go to Durango, and we were glad of it. There we basked in the love that reigned in the Navigator’s brother’s house. It is so long ago now – and I didn’t keep up the morning pages during this visit – I am a little stuck on the details.
I do remember the car was jiggly and I felt I could not write. I do remember the Navigator’s beautiful sister-in-law, perfect in her pink bathrobe, sharing with me the identities of the people in the photos on the walls. I do remember that en route, we visited the UFO Watchtower in Alamosa, where we each left an article of clothing in the garden of momentos. I remember the blistering sun.
It was in Durango that I learned the Ho'oponopono. And there I learned about geothermal spas. There I heard about children in Hawaii and yachts in Bermuda. There I clapped eyes on Dylan’s inspiration for his Romance in Durango. There I played the pegboard game 5 straight.
Dark blue light blue light gray white
Part of a moon part of a night
Dark blue light blue light green black
This is where the sparkle is at
That may not seem to be a poem about vanadium, but it is. There I learned about vanadium.
In the end, we had to drive the 350 miles back to Denver to get on the train home, so we broke the drive into two days and stayed at a spa in Mt. Princeton. It was so beautiful we thought about getting married there. We hoped that my niece and her fiance as well as my son and his would join us there in a triple wedding, the warm water and clear sky being really all a person needs to connect with their divinity. That and family.
When we woke in the morning of Friday, September 3, 2021, bedraggled with travel, and communion, and gratitude to each other, my beloved Navigator embraced me and told me I was special to him in a way no other woman was. I made a note in my calendar, “The Navigator loves me.”
Besides that – the erasing of my insecurity, the coalescing – the best part of the drive was the road work that caused us to stop. We got out of the car and just waited. It was a big Pema Chödrön- style pause. We could have driven a detour instead, but the detour itself was two hours long, and it was better to wait. We were a line of cars across the desert, motors off, lounging by our behemoths, or doing yoga there, sipping from our thermoses.. We were in a very pretty valley. When the road opened again, we saw that manly men had been clearing colossal boulders from the road, pushing them into the ditches. Some storm we had not witnessed had left its mark on both the road and us.
In Denver, we boarded the train home, ready for our new life together, maybe both still a little raw from the buffets* of our pasts, but ready to forgive and madly in love, supporting one another.
*I mean in the Biblical sense, “slaps”, as the wind might buffet a shore, with the accent on the first syllable and a pronounced final “t”; I do not mean “restaurants”, with the accent on the second syllable and a silent final “t”. Why are they spelled the same????