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I traded my riding gear for capris, a tunic, and espadrilles, and followed the scent of woodsmoke to the fire-pit patio for dinner at La Posada.

The post-sunset chill had thinned the crowd to two other couples and a handbag-sized King Charles Spaniel they called The Enforcer. Apparently, he’d earned the name for his nightly patrol—barking at the feet of anyone still out of bed after 10:30.

I have thoughts about dogs in restaurants, but at least this one had manners—and a purpose in life. By the time I finished my pozole, they’d paid the waitress and posed for a photo, The Enforcer front and center.

I wasn’t with my own friends or family, but I was basking in that energy all the same. I could savor it without having to summon my own depleted reserves to participate.

I felt settled. Satisfied.

The next day brought a different kind of satisfaction. After a long and productive editing session with memoir client Stephanie, I felt that rare clarity that comes when good work aligns with good company. I admired her discipline—she’s the only client who actually followed my advice and read every word of her book aloud, yielding not just sharper sentences but deeper insight for her readers. It would be easy for someone of her stature to phone it in, knowing she’d hit the bestseller list, but her effort to give readers the best she had within her is the embodiment of integrity.

When we signed off the Zoom call late in the afternoon, the air outside had turned cool and gusty—too blustery for a soak or a swim—so I decided to wander into town and see about dinner. Exiting the casita, I caught the faint, metallic sweetness of rain on dust—the name for it is petrichor—so I walked over to my bike to fetch rain gear and an umbrella.

Barstool Science and Road Magic

My oversized Bass Pro Shop rain jacket—roomy enough to go over my armored riding gear—made me look a bit like a walking tent, but kept me dry. I’d tried to get into Café Pasqual’s, winner of the James Beard Foundation’s America’s Classics Award in 1999. But word of its renown had gotten out long before I showed up. They didn’t even have a seat at the community table. The hostess said dinners were booked for the next two days, but if I came for breakfast or brunch, I’d have better luck.

The Shed had also been on my list, so I moved it to the top and was rewarded with a corner seat at the bar after being told the wait could be 30 minutes or more.

Road magic!

Perched at the angle of the bar, I found myself in conversation with a nuclear engineer from Virginia and, improbably, a couple from North Carolina who had once lived just down the street from me. We’d never met, but it reminded me how small the world can feel when we’re open to it. We began peppering the engineer with questions about Three Mile Island and whether the old SNL skit “The Pepsi Syndrome” had a kernel of truth. He took it all in stride, holding forth with clarity and good humor.

Somewhere between steam generators and spent fuel rods, I turned to him and asked, “Are you always the most interesting man at the bar?”

We all cracked up. He blushed a little but kept right on explaining isotopes with the delight of someone who rarely gets to talk shop outside the lab. As I nursed the last sips of my iced tea, I mused: Everyone deserves a night like this—a night to be listened to, delighted in. A night to feel like the crowd had come out just for them. I deserved a night like this too—a night to listen, to nudge, to take delight in someone else’s joy.

Midway through our shared laughter, Matt FaceTimed. I answered without hesitation, tilting the screen so he could take in the scene—the bar, the plates, the easy smiles of strangers who felt like friends and waved at him. He could see it on my face: I wasn’t just okay, I was glowing. He smiled back—that soft, relieved look he gets when he knows the road is giving more than it’s taking.

We didn’t talk long, but it was enough to share the joy. After we hung up, I turned back to the bar, where the conversation was still in full swing.

Cabrito and the Facts of Life

At some point, I asked the bartender if there was anywhere in town to get cabrito. I’d only had it once—in Dallas—and it had been tender and earthy, unforgettable. The tatted and mustachioed bartender explained that cabrito is a springtime dish, served once the male goats are old enough to leave their mothers.

It took a second for that to register. When it did, I winced, and let my jaw hang open. I’d assumed roasted goat was just goat. You know, like goat-goat. But now the business logic was laid bare: dairy operations don’t need many males. The rest—well, they’re “wasted,” as they say in the horseracing world.

Unsettling moments like that one carry truth, and I’m not going to deliver a TED Talk here, but it’s absolutely true that eating a baby goat carries gravitas that eating an adult does not. Will I eat cabrito if I ever see it on a menu? Time will tell.

I woke the next morning with that rare feeling of having been both entertained and restored. My boots were still dusty, but my spirit had settled. Santa Fe was doing what I’d hoped it would—offering space.

The Balanced Stroll of a Fearless Gunslinger

I walked to Café Pasqual’s just as the sun began slicing through the wind, passing through the main square where a couple of schools were evidently taking field trips. The students carried little clipboards for making notes as they scampered from one statue or fountain to the next.

A woman standing outside one of the adjacent shops called out, “Hey, lady, I love your outfit! You look like a tennis player!”

She wasn’t wrong: I was wearing my “skort” and a lightweight tunic that had seen me through more than one travel day. I grinned and waved, taking it as a compliment—even though part of me wondered if she was just trying to lure me into the store. I’ve spent enough time being pitched to, flattered, and handled to question motives.

But her timing and tone were so pitch-perfect, I didn’t care if I was her mark. She reminded me of Englishman Troy Hawke, whom I follow on Instagram. He floats around in a purple smoking jacket, tossing out theatrical compliments delivered with deadpan authority: “You have the vibe of a former president.” And my personal favorite: “You have the balanced stroll of a fearless gunslinger.”

It used to be hard for me to believe compliments like that (although I’ve never been called a gunslinger)—especially the ones about how I looked. But on this day, in this breeze, I felt good in my body. Not flawless—never flawless. Just... comfortable.

My spirits soared with the breeze.

Café Pasqual’s with Marsha and James

The restaurant was cozy and eclectic, with bright tilework, colorful papel picado banners strung across the ceiling, and framed posters celebrating past Día de los Muertos festivals.

I struck up a conversation with a New Hampshire couple to my left—Marsha and James—who seemed oddly delighted by me. When Marsha leaned in and said, “Are you famous?” I nearly spit out my breakfast beans.

“Hardly,” I laughed, then explained that apparently the breakfast hostess had mentioned I’d been turned away the night before, and word had gotten around. Everyone checked in on me like I was someone.

It was that rare kindness that travels along the grapevine when someone sees your disappointment and quietly does what it takes to turn it around. My heart.

I wasn’t used to being noticed like this—for nothing in particular. Not for my work, not for holding a family together, not for being the cool-headed one. Just for showing up, apparently glowing a little. It startled something tender in me.

Stephanie sometimes tells me what it’s like to be recognized—even decades after her television career ended. People stop her in grocery stores to share details about their lives as if they’ve known her forever. “We were pregnant at the same time as and our daughters have the same name!” She’s always gracious about it, but just hearing the stories exhausts me. The pressure to match someone’s projected meaning of you—to smile, connect, reciprocate—it sounds like a constant performance, especially in a social-media world where one slip on your part could land you in the doghouse.

What happened there at Café Pasqual’s was something else. When Marsha asked if I was famous, it was playful—a vacation question, not a real one. Who doesn’t want to sit next to “someone” at breakfast? But once I said I wasn’t, the conversation didn’t fade—it deepened. Being two “nobodies” was a kind of relief. There was no role to live up to, no image to maintain. Just warmth exchanged across a table, nothing riding on it.

Sometimes that’s the rarest kind of recognition—the kind that doesn’t ask for anything back.

O’Keeffe’s Later Years and My Own

I felt at home in Santa Fe, despite the many cultural differences from the East Coast. On the other side of me, a table of women in their sixties and seventies were talking animatedly about the news, asking smart questions, poking fun at the absurd. I didn’t join their conversation, but I didn’t need to. Their presence alone—their confident opinions, their curiosity—was balm enough. I felt included by proximity.

I took the long way to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, browsing the little shops and galleries along the plaza and taking dozens of pictures—street art, murals, sculptures, fountains. Santa Fe isn’t just a city with art; it’s a city of art. The nation’s oldest capital, it’s also one of its most creatively alive, with more galleries per capita than almost anywhere else in the U.S.

As I stood in line for a ticket at the museum, there were James and Marsha again, waving like we were old friends. We fell into step together in easy familiarity.

I’d never considered myself a devotee of O’Keeffe—of any artist, really—but the museum invited me into her world in a way that surprised me. I lingered over her color studies, her bone-and-blossom compositions, but it wasn’t the paintings that stayed with me. It was the photos of her later years—her angular profile, the lined skin she made no attempt to disguise. She looked proud. Powerful. Unapologetically herself.

I’ve always said I wouldn’t “get work done,” and here was a woman decades ahead of me who modeled what that could actually look like. She wore what she wanted, even took her Siamese cat camping—a detail that captured both her eccentricity and her self-possession. O’Keeffe saw what she saw, and made others see it too.

Each woman must define for herself what self-possession means, and there are definitely generational influences. For O’Keeffe it meant solitude; for my mother and her contemporaries, it meant poise under scrutiny. Each version requires courage and resilience. The girls and women coming up now face a different challenge altogether—the pressure to stay unflaggingly on.

The point, for me, is to choose a lane. Change lanes when you need to pass or be passed, but try not to mistake difference for superiority.

Thinking about all this brought me back to my client Stephanie, who maintains her original hair color and keeps her teeth camera-ready, knowing the spotlight could return at any moment. When we worked on her manuscript while I was in Phoenix, I told her my mother admired her—“She’s always a lady,” Mom had said, which was her highest form of praise.

Stephanie slipped into her public self without missing a beat. “Please tell your mom I admire the daughter she raised.” The compliment had been like a note passed between two dignitaries while I held the envelope.

Stephanie, like my mother, knows how to hold her own—and has carved out her lane. She likes it, she’s good at it, and that’s enough for me. I just worry about the people who dream of being influencers; many will find, in the end, that the price of visibility is too high.

O’Keeffe didn’t perform or put on a charm offensive. She didn’t need to. Her power came from deciding how she’d be remembered—before anyone else got the chance.

I learned this about myself back in my dance-recital days—rouge on my cheeks, hair lacquered into place—but it took a lot of growing up to own it. I liked the movement, the music, the excitement; what I didn’t like was trying to adopt a stage persona. It took years to understand that I could love expression without loving the stage.

That’s likely why the morning at Café Pasqual’s had felt so restorative. Once Marsha and I cleared up my lack of fame, I didn’t have to be somebody. I just had to show up. That’s when road magic materializes.

When I stepped outside the museum, the wind had finally died down. The air was still fresh but no longer insistent. I walked back slowly, savoring the quiet. That evening, I slipped into the hot tub and finally took a swim—my body warm, my limbs buoyant, my breath steady.

The road would call again in the morning. But for now, I let the water hold me. Cleansed. Restored. Ready.

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The road rose and fell through the high desert like a long exhale. Dust, water, and the faint sweetness of horse dung drifted through my helmet vents from Farmington, New Mexico’s McGee Park, where Thoroughbreds and Quarter Horses were taking their morning laps. That’s where I turned onto U.S. 550 South, headed for the tiny town of Cuba and, beyond it, the volcanic rim of the Valles Caldera.

The number 550 tugged at memory. Years earlier, I’d ridden its Colorado stretch—the Million Dollar Highway between Ouray and Silverton, all cliffs and hairpins—motorcycle catnip. But this section, gentler at 6,600 feet, suited me fine. I was decompressing after eleven days in Arizona with my parents, reveling in memories of road trips past and getting reacquainted with their changing lives.

I’d spotted Valles Caldera the night before in my Farmington hotel room consulting Google Maps with the practiced eye of a two-wheeled traveler. I always take the bird’s-eye view, scanning for patches of green and elevation wrinkles.

In this case, I noticed how the roads bent to skirt a circular depression. That told me something: the land had collapsed in on itself long ago, now dictating how every road around it would bend. I didn’t know I was reading more than topography; I was tracing the shape of my own fatigue in a landscape that mirrored how I felt—hollowed, spent, reshaped by forces I hadn’t yet reckoned with.

Something had given way inside me, and I was still figuring out what might grow in its place.

She Called Me Mija

A couple of hours later I pulled into Cuba, low on gas and ready for a break. What I found—besides fuel—was El Bruno’s Restaurante y Cantina, which beckoned me with a mural of a woman in a broad-brimmed hat, cradling a basket of vegetables, standing amid rows of green chile fields. The red chile ristras framing the scene felt like punctuation marks, exclaiming: Come and get it!

I parked the bike and stood in front of the mural for a minute, admiring the craftsmanship. A couple who looked to be my age pulled alongside and got out of their car. Rounding the corner, we looked at the OPEN sign on the glass door and grinned at each other.

El Bruno’s is a roadside surprise that feels like coming home—even if it’s your first time there. From the moment I arrived, the place radiated warmth—a living heritage that felt like celebration. The exterior is pure Northern New Mexico: stuccoed adobe walls, and a rustic bell tower over a painted door honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe. The meal would nourish me, yes—but so would the pause, the setting, the sense of place—all of it feeding something quieter I hadn’t yet named.

Inside, the glow of terracotta tiles and worn leather chairs welcomed me like an old friend. I was seated by a sunny window as the room quickly filled up under the watchful gaze of Virgin Mary portraits and chile ristras.

I didn’t know it yet, but the next day I’d see a monument in Santa Fe’s Cathedral Park—bronze figures cast in a circle: a conquistador, a friar, a farmer. The official version of New Mexico’s roots. But here, in Cuba, the story didn’t need a pedestal. It was alive and ongoing—tucked into every bowl and every glance.

I ordered a Mexican Coke (cane sugar!), poured it over ice, and watched the sunlight bend with the bottle’s curve. The waitress called me mija, and I could tell it was a term of endearment. The moment was simple, but layered—like the food, the land, the place itself.

Tracing the Emotional Wake

Waiting for my chile relleno, I took out my journal. I didn’t write much—just enough to trace the emotional wake of my call with a friend I’ll call Tracy the night before. I’d been giving Matt daily updates all along, but Tracy hadn’t heard anything since I left North Carolina.

I gave her the full download. In telling it, I felt the weight for the first time—how quickly the roles between my parents and me had reversed, how long I’d been holding back tears, and how little time there really was to make the best of what remained.

I paid the waitress and went outside to the café’s courtyard to sit facing the sun. The winds still blew, but the walls gave me shelter, so my bones could throw off the cold. For the first time all day, I felt held. Grounded.

I left Cuba with warmth in my chest and a heaviness I couldn’t name, the road unspooling toward higher ground.

By the time I reached the Valles Caldera, I was climbing into air so thin and bright it felt scrubbed clean. The road curved along the rim of a caldera—once a volcano. Steam still rises from its seams. Wildflowers have taken root where magma once boiled: a land still breathing in its sleep.

The Rhythm That Carries Me

I passed a line of horse trailers and felt myself back in my teens, driving a baby-blue Beetle to Mamaw and Papaw’s farm to ride my chestnut mare, Lucinda. We showed in the hunter-jumper division, but my favorite rides were bareback in the fields. I’d whistle and she’d trot over. With a rock or fence post to boost me up, off we went. These days I pat the gas tank instead. Different mount, same medicine.

That remembered rhythm with Lucinda was a clue to what I needed now: not escape, but return—to motion, to presence, to something strong enough to hold me upright.

When the adrenaline finally wore off, I was left with the tremble that follows a long vigil—alert but emptied, exhausted not physically but cellularly.

Aftermath as Teacher

More than a million years after the implosion, the caldera lives on in traces of aftermath—steam, springwater, shifting soil—like someone who’s weathered a crisis and is learning how to live in its wake. Like me.

I parked for a while and listened to the wind moving through the pines, unable to miss the reflection: too many years had quietly vanished between me and my parents while I was busy raising children and keeping my own life afloat. Still, the land offered a counterpoint—emptiness isn’t the end. Even spent ground can regenerate. After a fire, meadows bloom.

And maybe that’s why the caldera felt familiar—not in its shape, but in its state. I wasn’t just riding through it. I was riding with it.

Two vessels, hollowed but intact. Still breathing. Still becoming.

After the volcanic silence of Valles Caldera, I descended into the promise of Santa Fe—charged by its high-desert air, creative pulse, and gentle pace. It was my first visit to Santa Fe, the nation’s oldest capital—a fact no one bothered to teach me. My destination was La Posada, a resort a couple of blocks from the plaza’s shops and historic attractions—close enough to wander on foot, yet tucked away from the constant hum of visitors.

There, I would finally have room to feel it all.

All of what?

Whatever came up.

My first encounter with the staff came in the person of its chief valet, Richard, who wore a black felt cowboy hat and the expression of a man who understood his mission. I pointed to the sign advising that all vehicles must be turned over to the valet and, assuming he didn’t know how to ride one, said with a grin, “Uh huh, you’re not parking my bike.”

He burst into a big belly laugh, but the joke was on me: he’d just sold his own motorcycle and was already pining to get back in the saddle. He let me park in a plum spot under a huge cottonwood.

I would see him several times over the course of my stay, and each time he greeted me by name—a small gesture that hit me hard. Most people don’t or can’t pronounce it correctly. But he did. My heart.

Sunlight and a Soak

All La Posada guests stay in a casita, each of varying styles and sizes. Mine was a single-story adobe made up of three Artist Suites embracing a shared courtyard. Inside, I dropped my bags in the red-tiled foyer and stepped down into the bed-sit. First, I peeled off every layer, then collapsed on top of the bed while sunlight spilled across my bare skin. It wasn’t just about warmth. It was about healing. Sunshine is a balm, and I needed it down into my bones.

The buffeting winds echoed in the tightness of my neck, stiff from days of bracing. In time, I slipped out my retainers and let my jaw unclench, then reached for the remote to quiet the overhead television.

I wanted silence. But silence is never absolute. The more I strained to hear it, the more insistent the subtle sounds became: the tic-tic of heat against the window sash, the low surge of electricity beneath the bathroom sink keeping the water hot, the thunk-thunk of the housekeeper’s cart bumping across the pavers outside. My body was learning to relax, but my mind resisted.

Even in quiet, the world hums on.

As I lay there, the sun inched across the edge of the duvet, marking not just the passage of light but the passage of time itself—spent and never to be regained. Like the eleven days I’d spent with my parents, already reduced to memory.

I hadn’t wanted to leave, not when I could see how much they appreciated the extra pair of hands and the fresh perspective I brought to current events. JJ even said it was nice having me around because his phone wasn’t ringing off the hook with requests for password assistance. Being there mattered. And I loved it. But I had to leave.

And the relief I felt in that decision carried the weight of guilt, because neither of my parents can take a vacation from aging or the demands they place on each other. Dad’s the one I most worry about because he has built his world around smoothing the path for Mom. His relief comes in the hours she meanders the aisles at Costco but it’s fleeting—soon replaced by the worry she should have been home by now.

Watching the sunlight creep across the room, I felt his exhaustion in my own body. It echoed how motherhood once taxed me: the endless vigilance, the constant talking, the little maintenance issues that never stopped. Love was always at the center, but so was fatigue. Both true at once.

And once I opened that door, my mind knew where to go. The reel began to play: me hurrying my boys along—through diapers, through tantrums, through the endless mess of childhood. Other mothers cried on the first day of school; I took a deep breath.

Babies, to me, were what you endured on the way to meeting the interesting adults they would become. I loved them fiercely, nursed them for years, poured myself into their survival. But the sheer intensity of those days overpowered me, and it took years before I could miss them properly.

Lying there, letting that motherhood reel fade, I knew I wasn’t finished. The memories had opened something larger. That’s when I realized I needed to extend my stay in Santa Fe. I didn’t grant myself formal permission, but I knew it was necessary—to suspend the motion long enough to let everything settle. To breathe into this new normal: being a woman who had let her relationship with her parents drift.

They’d let it drift too, absorbed easily into JJ’s orbit and the life of their only granddaughter, Bebe. But that was no excuse.

The sun against my skin underscored the truth—what feels endless is always running out. Matt’s been orphaned for a couple of years now, and my time will also come.

Yet here I was, in a resort where every need could be met with a phone call, in a city that had been waiting centuries for people simply to stop and listen. It struck me as an outrageous luxury to lie in that patch of sun and ask nothing more of myself than to be.

The longer I stayed, the more I understood that stillness, too, is a kind of work—the kind that lets the deeper truths rise to the surface.

When the sun reached my toes, I was ready to move again. I stepped into the bathroom and ran the water then flicked on the weather channel, worried about the severe storms churning across Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Another sign that Santa Fe was the perfect layover, a chance to catch my breath until the skies cleared.

But wait. Was I just indulging the lazy woman who wanted to lie in the sun for a few days? The answer was no—but the very fact that I had to interrogate myself told me how little permission I give to stillness.

The skies would clear soon enough. The storms inside would take longer.

Yes, the confrontation was inside: a wrestling match with myself. With the girl who had been impatient to grow up. With the young mother who rushed her toddlers along just to get a break. With the daughter who had let distance grow between herself and her parents. And also with the woman I was still becoming, who wanted to believe that stillness could be a form of strength, not a failure of will.

Then came the bath. Not a shallow tub insert, but a full-sized soaking tub. My last real soak had been weeks ago in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where my attendant, Shadow, wrapped me in towels at the Buckstaff baths like I’d earned a moment of grace. Here in Santa Fe, I gave myself that same permission.

The water, the quiet, the walls holding me—it all felt like something between prayer and exhale.

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I left the Painted Desert behind with the wind still buffeting my body, daring me to press on when it would’ve been easier to pull over and wait it out. But “waiting it out” might take a couple of weeks—who was I kidding?

This is where I should mention the small but mighty invention of heated grips. I’ve learned over time that if I keep my hands and neck warm, my core temperature will stabilize. I may still be chilly from all that wind, but my teeth don’t chatter uncontrollably. Of course, this is much more difficult when the ambient temperature is below 55F.

I took the first opportunity to get off I-40 and head north toward Farmington, New Mexico, after a brief hesitation about traveling through the Navajo Nation. I was a tourist, of course, and wanted to be “the right kind.” What I’ve learned after sixty-three years on the planet is to listen more than speak, and to err on the side of humility. Fortunately, I don’t ride a noisy bike or have a great need to speed or trespass.

I hoped that counted for something.

Riding with Reverence

I didn’t see much evidence of human habitation for several miles, other than the paved road and some pasture fencing. To be honest, I was braced for the stereotypes I’d absorbed—images of neglect, want, and disrepair.

Reservations aren’t just waypoints on a map; they’re sovereign nations with their own stories, struggles, and ways. I know this through my friendship with Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and a novelist whose work often wrestles with what it means to belong—to land, to people, to story.

She lives in Cherokee, North Carolina, within the Qualla Boundary—a 57,000-acre land trust held by the U.S. government for the Eastern Band. From Annette, I’ve learned that tribal lands are not relics and their cultures are not fixed in the 1700s. They’re contemporary, sovereign spaces, alive with intention, culture, and complexity.

To me, travel is a form of continuing education—wherever it takes me, whatever it shows. I turned onto a road that some sources call Indian Route 12, others Navajo Route 12. The first reflects federal nomenclature, the second the Nation that maintains it. I’ll go with both: Navajo Indian Route 12. It’s part of the Dinetah Scenic Byway, which includes both Route 12 and Route 64, offering access to various points of interest within the reservation.

I didn’t want music or podcasts that afternoon—just the hum of the bike and the quiet awareness that I was a guest. Gas was scarce. Cell service, spotty. I stayed in the moment and rode.

I’d plotted my route using Google Maps like always, favoring green spaces and curving roads wherever I could find them. This stretch didn’t come with roadside attractions or Instagrammable cafés. It offered juniper-scrubbed mesas, sun-bleached signage, and a windswept landscape that demanded respect.

I filled up at a station inside reservation boundaries and noticed a small decal on the pump that referenced tribal revenues being retained by the Navajo Nation. It struck me as more than a bureaucratic footnote—it felt like a declaration of sovereignty in gasoline and service. My puny three-gallon fill-up wouldn’t make much difference, but it felt good to do business there.

I pulled the bike to the edge of the tarmac so others could use the pumps, then ducked inside to use the bathroom. On my way back out, I passed three men standing just outside the door. I’m used to men watching me as a female motorcyclist, and there’s something reptilian about the vigilance that kicks in—I’d be foolish not to clock them. My body did what it always does—braced, quickened my pace, eyes on the bike.

But when they didn’t break their stream of conversation, I realized they were probably at the crossroads for companionship, gossip, or simply to rest awhile—ordinary reasons, like anyone. I kept walking, noticing the gap between reflex and recognition, a little ashamed at how quickly my body had cast them as a threat.

When I passed the Fort Defiance Indian Hospital Board, I slowed a bit. The Tsehootsooi Medical Center stood like a statement of purpose—its broad archway, clean lines, and well-kept grounds suggesting care shaped by community, not commerce. I thought—not for the first time—about how a care system grounded in place and culture, even with fewer resources, might do a better job of honoring its elders than the one my parents rely on.

Care Beyond the Code

Do you know how Dad’s doctor reacted to his Type 2 diabetes diagnosis? He wrote a prescription for Metformin and gave him a virtual pat on the head with this sendoff: “Cut the carbs and sugar.” That was it.

I got Dad a glucose monitor and learned how to use it right along with him, found an app to help track his readings, meals, and meds, and wrote to his doctor through the patient portal—starting with the dreaded words, “My daughter is here from North Carolina…” and ending with a request for a referral to a clinical dietitian who could walk him through better food choices and menu planning.

We spent hours on the phone with United Healthcare, trying to get a medication review—denied because the company hadn’t reimbursed enough on Dad’s prescriptions yet. That’s right: his care hadn’t cost them enough to trigger preventive measures.

Wondering where I stand on for-profit health insurance? Here’s a clue. This isn’t about bad actors on the other end of the phone. It’s about a system built without a conscience. For-profit health insurance doesn’t care if you’re sick. It cares if you’re billable.

And let’s be honest: I didn’t step in because I love glucose monitors. I stepped in because I couldn’t stand the thought of my parents trying to navigate that system alone. Dad gets the brunt of it now—because diabetes has numbers. It has charts, protocols, prescriptions. It’s the kind of condition Western medicine knows what to do with.

The Cost of Comfort

But Mom’s the one I worry about. If her mind really starts to slip—and I suspect it already has—it won’t show up on a lab report. There’s no tidy metric for memory loss, no universally respected protocol for ambiguity. In our culture, the body is treated with science. The mind? With suspicion. Psychiatry and psychology still occupy a not-quite-reputable domain—soft sciences, whispered about.

We treat mental decline like we’re still half in the Dark Ages—first with denial, then with shame. As if confusion were contagious. As if madness still needed to be put down. It’s a stigma with long roots—tied to centuries of fear, misdiagnosis, institutional abuse, and religious interpretations that cast mental illness as possession, punishment, or shame.

Even today, we’re more comfortable discussing blood sugar than brain fog, more likely to seek medication than meaning. And when it comes to the elderly, we often conflate forgetfulness with failure.

Mom will keep performing competence until the wheels come off. That’s how she’s built. And I’ll keep doing triage from a distance—reading between the lines, checking with JJ before I try filling in the gaps.

Still, it’s not just her stubbornness I’m tracking now. Something else feels off. I wonder how much of her change in personality is chemical. She’s been on gabapentin for years—prescribed for restless leg syndrome, though studies have shown it can impair cognition, behavior, and memory over time. I didn’t know that until recently. None of us did.

We treat women’s discomfort like a nuisance to be medicated, not a clue to something deeper. And we rarely talk about what those medications might cost in the long run. It’s not just about side effects—it’s about how much we’re willing to dampen a person’s clarity to preserve everyone else’s comfort. To keep them quiet. To make them “more manageable.”

That’s the setup we give ourselves. And it’s a stark contrast to what I’d just passed on Navajo land.

A Different Kind of Elderhood

I didn’t know what kind of care people received inside that Navajo medical center’s walls, and I wasn’t going to assume. But from the outside, it looked like a place that belonged to the people it served—not just a stop on a PPO network map.

From what I’ve heard and read, the Indian Health Service, underfunded as it is, operates on a care model that’s fundamentally different from the private system I had briefly navigated on behalf of my parents.

In Cherokee, North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians runs its own health system—the Cherokee Indian Hospital Authority—under a self-governance model. In 2021, they became the first Native nation to launch a Medicaid-managed care entity: the EBCI Tribal Option. Housed within their hospital system, it focuses on relationship-based care, community trust, and culturally relevant services.

No system is perfect, but this is a deliberate effort to align care with identity and place—something that feels a world away from the siloed, impersonal systems my parents face. It’s closer, in some ways, to the VA: centralized, eligibility-based, with both local clinics and larger regional hospitals. But unlike the VA, many IHS and tribally run facilities weave cultural practices and community ties into patient care. Not every tribal system has the same resources or outcomes. Still, the ones that do it well offer a glimpse of what’s possible—care shaped not just by budget, but by belonging.

Maybe that’s what I sensed—that possibility. That care could come from somewhere deeper than billing codes and fifteen-minute windows. That you could be treated as kin, not as overhead. That maybe, just maybe, intention matters as much as budget.

I don’t pretend to understand the full cultural framework behind Indigenous models of elder care. I only know what I’ve been told—that in some communities, aging doesn’t strip a person of worth. There’s reverence, or at least recognition, that growing older isn’t just a decline in utility.

Elderhood has its own purpose—for the individual and for society, if we will only choose to see it.

Yet in America we tend to sideline the elderly once they’re no longer productive, especially if they’re inconvenient or slow. I feel the tension myself—between compassion and exhaustion, between love and the question no one wants to say out loud: How long will this go on like this?

I remember standing in the garden in Duncan, Arizona, watching Deborah feed the cats. After ushering the two fat ones inside to their dishes so the others could eat in peace, she reached for the garden hose and, lowering her voice, said with quiet certainty, “We live too long, Tamela. I believe that. Medicine has pushed us too far, and society can’t keep up.”

I didn’t disagree. How could I disagree?

But on further reflection, maybe the problem isn’t that we live too long—maybe it’s that we haven’t embraced what those final years demand of us. The inconvenience, the surrender, the intimacy. Maybe we haven’t reckoned with the character-forming nature of caring for the infirm. Or being willing to be cared for.

By the time I pulled into Farmington, the sun was well on its way below the horizon. I showered and walked to a pizza joint, cupping my hand around my earbud to keep the wind from whisking my voice away as I checked in with Matt.

I didn’t have the words yet—not even for him. But something had begun to shift inside me, quiet and deep, like the pressure animals feel before the ground gives way.

Something real that didn’t yet have a name.

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A few days earlier, JJ and I had been scrolling Zillow listings—single-story homes close to shopping and health care—as if the right floor plan in the right location could fix the future.

Now, rolling through the admission gate at Painted Desert National Park, I could still feel that conversation humming under my skin.

Dad’s energy to move was flagging while Mom’s resistance was rising. He can shoulder a lot before stepping in, but when he does, it’s decisive. He wasn’t there yet. Not even close.

What I felt on the road was what I felt at their house: throttle versus wind.

Ghosts of Route 66

When I stopped at the ranger station—as I always do—the man at the desk helped me plan my stops. I vaguely remember visiting the park when I was a girl and buying a striped red piece of petrified stone with a jump loop drilled through the top. I’d mounted it on my charm bracelet when I got back home. I wonder what became of it—maybe Mom tucked it away, the way she saved so many things, holding memory in objects as an anchor in time.

I inherited that same impulse. When we downsized from our house to a condo, I threw away preschool macaroni art and paper-plate handprints. It nearly broke me. I had to learn that memory can’t all live in objects. Some of it has to live in presence—the way you show up, the way you stay.

I didn’t want to miss the little strip of Route 66 that the park had preserved, and the ranger told me, “Look for the line of telephone poles that still marks the roadbed. Can’t miss it.”

Route 66 was officially struck from the U.S. Highway System in 1985, after decades of declining traffic and bypass construction that rendered it obsolete in function—but not in memory. We took it several times in the late ’60s and early ’70s, riding long days toward my dad’s side of the family in what’s now called the Inland Empire of California.

We got one shot at a motel on the trip west and another headed east, so we kids became discerning judges of our options. Cool neon signs helped us make the first cut, then we judged diving-board heights. If the pool had a slide too? “Pull over, Dad!”

If a motel had air conditioning, it would say so in big, bold signage, but the real prize awaited us indoors: Magic Fingers under the mattresses. Drop in a quarter and the whole bed vibrated like a carnival ride, making our voices sound like we were singing into a box fan. Too young to form our own theories about how others used the beds, we kids were convinced we were being pampered like movie stars.

Back then, Route 66 felt like a playground for the whole country—a line stretching from Chicago to LA, across time zones and regional AM radio signals, stitched together by local flavor. It wasn’t just a road—it was the trip.

By late morning, the whole region was under fire watch, and the wind at the Route 66 exhibit was so fierce I worried my bike might blow off its kickstand. I’m not kidding. A woman pulled alongside my bike in a minivan wearing a sun visor. She was so concerned about me she mouthed, You OK? I nodded from inside my helmet, though I wasn’t sure the movement even registered with all the buffeting. I added a thumbs-up to be sure.

Standing there at the Painted Desert, I-40 roaring a few miles off, I felt the difference in my bones. Route 66 was where you paused. I-40 is where you bypass. The interstate forced travelers to speed up, not slow down. It even trained the wildlife not to wander too close.

Maybe that’s why I started thinking about my own family’s shortcuts—the ways we sometimes rush past the moments that matter.

Carter’s kind of Wedding

I was eager for the next stop, at the Painted Desert Diner. I’d already burned off the powdered eggs and instant oatmeal from the Best Western. That’s when JJ had called.

“Tam, what’s this about Mom and Dad driving to North Carolina after Carter’s wedding? After? You’re okay with that?”

Carter, my 36-year-old eldest son, was getting married in a month. Courthouse steps, a simple lunch—no registry, no videographer, no expectations. Just show up. He’d said when invited my parents, It’s no big deal if you can’t come to the ceremony, but I want you to meet Katie.

It was the kind of phrasing I admire—not pushy, not needy, but gracious and clear. The emphasis wasn’t on him being celebrated. It was on Katie. On who she is, and how much she matters to him.

I don’t know where he learned that restraint; I certainly didn’t model it back when I was in the trenches raising him.

By the time Mom and Dad got his call, they already had other events on the calendar—the kind of invitations that had been preceded a year ago by a save-the-date postcard. Somehow, the simplicity of Carter and Katie’s nuptials scrambled the usual cultural signals.

JJ and I both saw the irony: if Carter and Katie had gone full production—matching outfits, drone footage, personalized hashtags—our parents would’ve cleared their calendars without hesitation.

I’ve long believed American wedding culture lost its mind, but that’s just me editorializing. The truth is, there is clarity in all that spectacle. People rise to the occasion. They book the flights, they buy the shoes, they smile for the camera.

JJ was determined to make things right. “If they don’t go,” he told me, “they’ll regret it the rest of their lives.”

His voice was measured, steady—like it gets when he’s trying to hold everyone’s future in place before something snaps.

I told him I agreed, but I wasn’t going to guilt-trip them. “They are taking Carter at his word—meeting Katie is more important than when they meet her.”

“Well, if this were Bebe’s wedding I’d be livid.”

He asked me not to roll out yet, to wait until he got to their house and put them on speakerphone. I don’t remember everything that was said—something about keeping promises. About how showing up matters more when no one demands it.

There wasn’t a lot of back-and-forth. No negotiation. Just a quiet pause, and then Dad said: “We’ll be there.”

That was it. Just a turn in the road—small at the moment, but it changed the map.

I pulled into the Painted Desert Diner, tucked between two sturdy RVs for windbreak. The diner is within the Painted Desert Visitor Center. Designed by Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander as part of the Mission 66 initiative, the place has the vibe of a mid-century desert mirage—flat roofs, wide eaves, steel beams holding up the sky. Even the ketchup bottles seem architecturally placed.

Some visitor centers are beige and forgettable, but this one in turquoise and orange had a kind of quiet cool to it. Neutra wanted harmony with the landscape. Maybe that’s why I found a little of my own there

.

I’d just taken the top bun off my Hatch green chile cheeseburger when my phone buzzed.

It was Dad. Just checking in—where I was, how the weather was. Normal stuff.

His voice sounded lighter than it had earlier on speakerphone, but we didn’t talk about the wedding. That decision had already been made. Stare decisis—the matter was settled.

We slipped back into familiar rhythm, like rerouting onto the old road after a stretch of high-speed bypass. Slower, less direct. But known.

I’ve always admired the way he could step back once the decision was made, without rehashing or pressing. I had to learn that the hard way. But I did.

Eventually.

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I broke gravitational pull from Phoenix on a crisp Saturday morning. That’s the only way I can describe it—breaking free not just from the pull of geography, but from the ambient sorrow of watching my parents age, and the quiet ache of leaving my brother behind to carry so much.

But mercifully, for the next few hours, I wouldn’t be leaving him at all.

We’d trailered the bikes to Fountain Hills to skip the mundanity of riding a semi-beltway. You should see JJ’s truck (bed uncluttered, wheels polished) and trailer (if he doesn’t have a strap or gizmo in there, it’s unnecessary). My brother has an unerring eye for quality—in clothes, real estate, cars—everything, right down to gasoline. Where I’m thrilled over finding pure gas, he’s got his own stash of racing fuel.

Looking back to our childhood, I never would have expected him to turn out this way.

The One Who Left

I’ve said it before: I was the “junior mother” of our family, three and five years older than my two siblings, and tasked with babysitting them on the evenings that Dad was out selling life insurance and Mom was on the home décor sales circuit. They didn’t leave us alone for more than a couple of hours, but one night that was long enough for hell to break loose.

I was in fifth grade—and they were going at each other like honey badgers in a tight pen. I can only describe my state as overwhelmed. I had to get the crazy behind me. And so I walked off, wandered the cornfields behind our little cluster of houses until I could feel my soul catch up to my body.

When it did, I knew I was in a heap of trouble. Hours had passed since I “ran away from home,” as everyone called it. That phrase was everywhere in my childhood, but I don’t think people use it today. Anyway, I knew that’s not what I’d done. I hadn’t packed a suitcase or a sandwich, I’d just walked away from chaos.

That was a pretty dramatic break from a situation outside my emotional pay grade, but it wouldn’t be the last. I tend to dissociate when the going gets tough if I can’t make a clean physical exit.

Back when I was a kid, most houses had three-sided ladders bolted to the side to support rooftop TV antennas. This was before cable and Wi-Fi, when snowy channels were brought to life through turn-dials and rabbit ears, and those ladders were everywhere.

I’ve always been a nimble climber, never afraid of heights. I don’t know what made me try it, but sometime in seventh or eighth grade, I climbed that ladder straight up to the roof. I loved it up there.

From that perch, high above the flat Ohio farmlands, I could see for miles. Cornfields stretched wide, with a single giant oak at the center, rimmed by white outbuildings, and a Mail Pouch tobacco barn. It was blissfully quiet up there—away from my younger siblings, away from the hum of the afternoon movie or vacuum cleaner. I could think my own thoughts. Find my own peace.

No one knew to look for me on the frigging roof. One day, a neighbor spotted me from her garden and tossed me a big juicy tomato. “Enjoy!” I don’t think she ever told my parents, bless her.

These days, road-tripping gives me the same feeling—minus the elevation. When I’m out there—just me, the bike, the road, and the sky—I feel like that girl again. Not hiding, exactly. Just claiming some space. Looking for a view no one else thought to climb toward.

A Peace Sign and a Toll

Bebe would be riding pillion with her dad that day. At twenty, she’d grown into her mother’s riding gear, and was practically bouncing in her motorcycle boots when we pulled into the Target shopping center parking lot to launch our route to Payson. JJ promised to bring Mom a treat from a place called Pie in the Pines in Heber-Overgaard just beyond, then we would part ways.

The last time I saw her on a bike, Bebe was about four, sitting between JJ’s knees on his dirt bike, her little braids flicking his jacket like tassels. “Faster, Daddy!” she’d hollered, holding on to the crossbar between the handlebars—and he obliged, grinning like a man who couldn’t believe his luck of the genetic draw.

Time, you sly magician—you grant us miracles when we’re not looking. Just yesterday, she was a blur of braids and baby teeth. Now, her hand flashed the peace sign to every rider headed the other direction—low and casual, like a natural-born motorcyclist. I felt it in my chest. Time is a genie, all right. But there’s always a toll. In time, it will be paid. The genie gives you a beautiful day in the mountains with your brother and niece. The thief reminds you that your parents won’t be here forever.

The day felt charmed, but the winds were fierce and fire-danger meters dotted the shoulder of Arizona 87 North. About forty miles in, Google Maps pinged me with a crash report and a ten-minute delay. No big deal.

We slowed behind a tangle of stopped traffic before realizing, hey, we don’t have to put up with this on motorcycles! We filtered through the lines of cars and made for the shoulder, just as I’ve done in Europe—where no one clutches their pearls about a motorcycle bypassing gridlock. It’s not rude. It’s resourceful. Efficient.

At the top of the line, a first responder gave us the lay of the land. “You can wait if you want,” he said, “but we’ve got seven units on the way. Could be a while.” We made the turn.

The Leader of the Pack

Back at Target, where we’d started, JJ peeled off his helmet and walked toward me. Tall, lean, calm. “Well,” he said, “I can trailer you back up north of Phoenix and you can end the day near Flagstaff, or you can stay over with us again and head out early. Or…” he tipped his head toward the sun, “…you can try the other route through the White Mountains. Whatcha want?”

That’s when it hit me—all I’d been holding. Guilt, gratitude, grief. The ache of realizing I was leaving him with the messiness of life as the one who stayed—the one who steadied—and the quiet shame of realizing how long he’d already carried it.

JJ was the leader of the pack now, and had been for decades. I’d left home at twenty, thinking I was the brave one, but it didn’t look like that from the Target parking lot. He’d circled ’round our Ohio hometown most of his adult life and semi-retired to Arizona with our parents five years ago. He knew their moods, their rituals, where they hid the guns. He knew everything.

I had just dipped a toe into the terrain he’d long since mapped. And I was worn out by it. I couldn’t go back. Not even for another night. “I’m going,” I told him. “Even if I only make it a hundred miles.”

And so I turned east—into the fullness of what that direction has always meant. Reentry. Reclamation. Reckoning. I couldn’t hold back the tears, so I lifted my face shield and let the wind do its thing.

Sometimes it feels good to let your heart ache.

Once I peeled off toward Superior, the sky opened. JJ and I had avoided this route earlier, knowing there was bridge and road construction on US 60, and nobody enjoys that kind of stop-and-go hassle. But taking it now, alone, turned out to be one of the best surprises of the entire trip.

The construction bottleneck gave me time to sit still on the bike and drink in the landscape. Devil’s Canyon unspools in a series of sandstone folds—steep, narrow, and almost theatrical in its scale. The rock faces are ribbed and rust-colored. Even with construction equipment, the place felt sacred and watchful as the Salt River meandered through. I wouldn’t have slowed down for it on my own. But being made to wait gave me a better gift: time to look.

This was once known to the San Carlos Apache as Ga’an Canyon, or “Angels Canyon,” a sacred place in their tradition. Then came the settlers, who renamed it Devil’s Canyon—as they did with so many harsh or imposing landscapes across the United States. The name usually meant it was hard to get through, hard to tame. What was sacred to one group became ominous to another.

Around Miami, surface mines yawned across the earth—time-lapse scars of the Anthropocene, where human ambition mimics tectonic force. Everything rises, everything falls.

In Miami proper, I pulled off at Guayo’s El Rey, a family-run restaurant I’d visited just a week earlier with my parents and Bebe. I ordered the chile relleno—same waitress, same booth—and let the familiar food and blend of languages wrap around me like a clean cotton sheet. I hadn’t known how much emotional labor I’d been carrying until I stopped long enough to feel the absence of it.

Memento Mori, Memento Vivere

When I mounted up again, I was headed for one of the most stunning stretches of the trip: the climb into the Sevenmile Mountains along US 60. Geologists call this area the Arizona Transition Zone—where desert meets mountain, where rock uplifts and fractures—but I wouldn’t learn that until I sat down to pen this account. Riding through it, I was in a transition zone in every sense.

I could do my part for Mom and Dad from afar—pushing their doctors to provide the care my parents deserved via medical portals, texting Dad to cut his vegetables each morning so they’d be ready to roast at dinner—but it wasn’t the same as being on the front line like JJ. Still, this time I’d shown up. I had witnessed what I came to see—and now I needed to move forward without fleeing it.

The Sevenmile Mountains don’t climb and fall like a roller coaster so much as spiral—like soft-serve ice cream. The elevation came in waves, switchbacking through pine-shadowed air that felt cool and holy. This was no straight shot—it was a pilgrimage through time and space.

Climbing that mountain was a lesson in geology, yes—but also in grief. The landscape told a tale of uplift, erosion, collapse, and plates that shifted beneath the surface, mirroring the slow pressure building in me.

At the top, I stopped at Becker Butte Lookout. Two motorcycle helmets crowned roadside memorials there—crosses driven into the soil, plastic flowers faded in the sun. I dismounted and stood for a while, letting the silence settle. I lingered longer than I expected, and the swaggering Harleys I’d passed miles ago lumbered by.

I went back to my bike, but didn’t mount up. Instead, I reached into the handlebar pouch and pulled out my silver medallion etched with a skull and crossbones. Memento mori, it whispered: “Remember you must die.” The reverse side also held a truth: Memento vivere. “Remember you must live.”

So I did remember. I wasn’t just thinking about where I had to be, or what was waiting. Just the wind and the weight of a lifetime of memories, which I scanned like the cornfields from my childhood rooftop.

The Low Card Wins

Eventually, I replaced the medallion in its pouch and swung a leg over. Descending out of the sacred hush of the Sevenmiles and into an earthbound joy of small-town oddities and road signs when I reached a town named Show Low.

Yes, it’s an odd name. According to legend, the name originated with a poker game that settled a land dispute. The two men who had co-owned the land agreed whoever could “show low” in a cut deck of cards would win. One man turned over the deuce of clubs. “Show Low it is,” he said, and the name stuck.

It’s a funny origin story that makes people smile. But like so many American folk tales, it skips the part where the land was already lived in, already loved—long before colonial ideas of private property turned territory into something to be won by contract or card draw.

Before it became a Mormon ranching outpost, this region was part of the ancestral homeland of the White Mountain Apache. The nearby Forestdale Valley had long been a seasonal settlement where Apache families planted crops, hunted game, and told their own origin stories under those same stars.

When the Mormon settlers arrived, they believed they were claiming unused public land. At first, they welcomed the Apache who returned each spring. But as fences went up, water was diverted, and fields were planted, the uneasy coexistence fell apart. Eventually, the Apache insisted they leave. And unlike most stories of the western migration, these settlers actually did.

It’s a rare outcome—but not exactly a redemptive one. The Apache were eventually displaced. The land was still changed. Just without bloodshed. And if you think about it, blood isn’t the only way to erase a culture or unsettle a people.

Even my presence here is part of that legacy.

A white woman of sixty-three with bugs on my face shield and a memento mori medallion still scanning the horizon.

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My brother JJ and I had colluded before I arrived in Phoenix, and Dad was on board.

We wanted to help our parents downshift into a simpler life. One that didn’t depend on Dad maintaining the air conditioner via YouTube tutorials, or Mom dusting curio cabinets filled with memories no one else knew what to do with. The first step was neighborhood shopping.

Now my brother is an enthusiast. He can get you excited about choosing floor mats for a car you don’t even drive—that’s his gift. He brings people into his orbit by making them part of the process. When he says, “Hey, how ‘bout going with me to pick up my bike? Just got a new suspension,” even Mom has a hard time refusing him.

JJ and his daughter Bebe rolled in one afternoon, full of that shopping energy. “Hey, let’s take an afternoon drive. See some other neighborhoods.”

Mom sniffed a rat. “You all go ahead. I’ve got laundry to do.”

Dad said, “Oh come on. JJ’s just looking ahead, in case he and Christi want to downsize. We might find something we like too.”

Mom pursed her lips and let her eyes go dead.

I could never have pulled this next trick off. “You’ll be lonely if you stay behind,” JJ said with a grin, opening the front door. Then the stroke of genius: “Besides, we need your opinion.”

It was a gentle fiction, but a strategic one. It framed Mom not as the object of concern, but as a woman whose opinion still shaped the future. He’s so good at this stuff.

She took the bait, but cautiously. “Well, I don’t mind helping you look, but don’t talk to me about moving. I’ve had a back and two knee surgeries since we moved here,” she reminded us. “We just got this place the way we like it.”

JJ and Dad exchanged glances of relief and solidarity and Dad said, “Okay then, get your purse. I’ve already got a couple bottles of water.”

Different Kinds of Making

First stop: the original Sun City, built in 1960. People my age appreciate the Mid-Century Modern aesthetic, calling it “retro,” but Mom could barely keep her nose from tipping upward. This was not fun and edgy, it was downscale.

“You all go. I’ll wait.” Unspoken: nothing to see here.

My niece Bebe had been crocheting a summer top for herself, and said she’d keep Grammy company while she finished the current row.

Mamaw taught me to crochet when I was five or six, and, like Bebe, I took to it—duck to water. I’ve always loved fiber arts. There truly is something about the rhythm of the hands that steadies the mind. It’s one of the few ways I can stay in the room even when part of me wants to slip away.

Mom never really took to crochet or knitting, though she tried. I remember finding that unfinished yellow acrylic sweater when we cleaned out the Ohio house—still on the needles, abandoned mid-sleeve.

She preferred a different kind of making. She always doodled. On hold with a company? Doodle on the back of an envelope. Watching a show that didn’t carry her attention? Doodle caricatures of the actors.

Her true joy is painting. She’s got a couple neighbor girls who come by for lessons, and she treats it like a finishing school.

If one of them says huh or yeah, she stops them cold.

“Excuse me? It’s not huh, we say please repeat that,” and “We don’t say yeah. Ladies say yes.”

There’s artistry in the brushwork, sure—but the real lesson is posture, diction, poise. She’s not just passing along a craft. She’s shaping character.

But that afternoon in the van, Mom had no brush in hand, no lesson to teach, no part to play. Bebe had her yarn. I had my inner monologue. Mom had only the quiet hum of an agenda she hadn’t chosen. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t sulking. But she wasn’t herself either—and when she’s quiet like that, I worry. Stillness doesn’t suit her. She needs something to push against, something to shape or improve.

More Than Square Footage

Next, we visited a newer development, Sun City Grand—polished, well-appointed, with every amenity imaginable. Lots of choices, condos, duplexes, single-family homes, but, unlike the original Sun City development, this one lacked a continuity-of-care model I favor, the kind that could accommodate both independence and future needs.

Dad said, “Wow, I could see us living here.” Mom may not have heard that, but if she did, she ignored it.

We toured an open house that I thought was perfect—plenty of light, beautiful kitchen, smart layout. I would have signed an offer on the spot.

“I can’t live in 1,700 square feet,” Mom sniffed, crossing her arms. “I need at least what we have now.”

I lowered my voice and said optimistically, "You know, Mom, if you move here you won't need your own art studio. You can paint at the community center and save a lot of money on the mortgage."

She didn’t even pause. “I need my creative space to myself.”

Checkmate.

JJ managed the day just right. He didn’t push—just promised we’d go out again tomorrow and look at a neighborhood where they’d all attended political fundraisers and community events and knew a few residents. It wasn’t my first choice—no continuity of care, and at least fifteen years older than The Grand—but both Mom and Dad perked up at the established homes and landscaping—amazing how tall some cactus grow!

I pulled up Zillow and started reading off listings in the area, limiting the filter to homes over 2,000 square feet. I live in a 1,600-square-foot condo—plenty for us—but for Mom, square footage wasn’t about comfort. The move wasn’t about physical labor. It was about letting go of something she’d pursued most of her life and lovingly personalized.

More than once, she said, “I can’t even think about starting over…”

We kept circling the subject of the move. JJ and I weren’t pushing, exactly—but we were trying to hold up a mirror. Mom clung to her domestic routines like they were life preservers, and in some ways, they probably were.

And then it occurred to me—what if she wasn’t resisting just because of pride, or fear, or her usual need for control? What if she was simply… worn out? What if all those years of keeping the show running—of keeping us scrubbed, the furniture polished, and selling enough insurance to earn a trip to Australia—had used her up in ways she didn’t know how to name?

What if this wasn’t resistance at all—but the quiet cost of carrying so much, for so long?

The Rhumba Moment

That night, the Rhumba stopped working. (It’s actually a Shark, but we all call them Rhumbas now—like Kleenex or Thermos.) The whole point of buying it was to save her time and effort, to automate a daily burden.

Apparently, the filters needed cleaning so she dug into that like a gopher. Then the battery wouldn’t hold a charge. One frustration stacked atop another. Her face was pinched in that way I now recognize: the quiet panic of not being able to keep up.

I heard the clicks and sighs, the replayed YouTube video. I’ve never had one of those vacuums, but owed it to her to see if there was anything I could do. I lifted the unit gently, and without really thinking, must have properly positioned it near the charging dock. The magnet caught. The light blinked on. It started charging.

Mom looked relieved and humiliated at the same time. I hadn’t earned the ease, but I got it. It was just dumb luck that my hand moved the right way. And yet I’d solved something she couldn’t. That’s the quiet cruelty of aging in a so-called convenience economy: tools arrive too late to use with ease—and help, too late to ask for without shame.

The Shark wasn't the only device acting up that week. The next day, in the van between retirement communities, Mom was tapping at her phone and sucking her teeth the way she does when something’s off.

“I’ve got to renew this phone storage plan,” she muttered.

A Scam Wrapped in Memory

Dad caught the edge in her voice from the front seat. “Lemme see, Gloria,” he said gently and held his hand out, palm up.

He doesn’t like to admit it, but he’s tired of being tech support, and he's not even that good at it—only by degree. He’s tired of settings and subscriptions and troubleshooting on tiny screens with fingers that don’t work the way they used to. Tired of the way so-called “smart” devices make people feel dumb. I’m just a few years behind them.

My boys are the digital natives who shake their heads at my gaffes.

Mom handed the phone over. I watched him squint and scroll, watched her try not to hover while pretending she didn’t need his help. I imagined the quiet panic roiling inside her—the same kind I’d seen the night before with the vacuum. A panic not about the task, but about becoming the person who needs help. She always tried to be the problem solver, anticipating them, warding them off whenever possible.

These things—phones, vacuums, smart speakers, thermostats—they’re supposed to make life easier. But for my parents, they often do the opposite. Each one asks for an update, a new password, a subscription plan, a firmware refresh. Each one, in its own way, reminds them they’re not built for this pace.

The phone message wasn’t just tech fatigue—it was a scam. One of those predatory pop-ups disguised by a livery of legitimacy, warned that her storage was full, her memories in peril. Renew now, it said. Just $7.99 to keep your photos safe.

Dad talked her down gently that time, walking her through what was real and what wasn’t. But the next day, I watched it happen again when I took her out to do a couple of errands. The same panic bloomed. The same held breath as she squinted at the alert, her thumb hovering over the screen.

“But if I don’t, they’ll be gone,” she whispered. “Everything will be gone.”

For Mom, it wasn’t about storage plans. It was about the thousands of photos and videos that tether her to the life she built. The faces of grandchildren, of dogs now buried, of rooms she decorated, parties she hosted and family members long gone. Every one of them had been saved for a reason. Each was proof that she’d made something beautiful of her life.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to find the people who build these traps for aging minds and take a square-handled ice pick to their servers. I’m not a violent person, but there’s something in me that rages when memory is weaponized against the people who treasure it most.

What these scams exploit isn’t ignorance. It’s love.

And there’s no antivirus for that.

I didn’t fix much that week. Not really. JJ was the steady hand, the one who’d been in the trenches all along. He knew when to nudge, when to let it go, and how to keep things light even when they weren’t.

But I showed up. I listened. I stayed in the room when it got uncomfortable. And when I wanted to change the subject—or the outcome—I usually didn’t.

I am still learning how to stay present without trying to fix what can’t be fixed, or outrun what hurts to see.

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My parents’ home is built in the architectural language of controlled ease—desert-toned stucco, stacked stone, and tidy xeriscaping, built for light, comfort, and low maintenance. You might imagine what it looks like inside and think: neutral palettes, clean surfaces, a ceiling fan slowly turning over an open-concept living space. Something equally streamlined and uncluttered.

There’s some of that, but my mother’s taste leans more collected than minimalist, more storied than spare. Let’s be clear: the house isn’t cluttered, but it is full—of framed prints from their travels, decorative trays, small sculptures, and carefully composed vignettes. Everything feels deliberate. Chosen. Held onto not just for beauty, but for memory.

More Than Ornament

And right inside the front door, anchoring the foyer like a piece of living memory, is a black lacquered Victorian sleigh. Fully restored with red upholstery, hand-striped in gold, trimmed with painted medallions, it looks like something straight out of a Currier and Ives print. Heck, for all I know, it might have been in a print. Or at least, that’s the effect.

No one needs a sleigh in Arizona. It’s a whisper from another time, another world—anachronistic, but not ironic. Just a beautiful thing that insists on being seen.

It was my mother’s treasure from the Ohio days. Dad found it somewhere and had it restored by Amish craftsmen because she loves Victoriana. He commissioned every detail, which must have cost a fortune.

To understand that sleigh—and her instinct to preserve it—you have to understand what Victorian beauty meant to my mother. The Victorian era offered a template for how life ought to be: genteel, orderly, feminine. The women in idealized portrayals had parlor chairs and fresh flowers, velvet cushions and quiet authority. They presided over pretty rituals of domesticity. In that imagined world, dignity didn’t require a college degree—it required poise. Lace curtains could signal refinement. A sleigh could signal status—or survival.

That vision of womanhood came from antique shops, gift catalogs, and from the homemaking traditions of those who longed for beauty but didn’t inherit it. The magazine Victoria reinforced this fantasy, and Mom is a longtime subscriber. For someone who grew up with little, the appeal of Victoriana lay in its promise: you didn’t have to be born into grace—you just had to evoke it.

The movie Gone with the Wind sealed the deal. Scarlett’s hoop skirts and house-pride may have opened the story, but what really struck Mom was her comeback. Scarlett rebuilt from the rubble—through grit, cunning, and sheer force of will. For my mother, that film wasn’t a problematic relic cultivating sympathy for the Lost Cause, it was a blueprint for how to rise. Using Scarlett’s example, you didn’t have to be born into luxury—you just had to act the part, and refuse to let go of the dream.

You can see that ethos on full display in the curio cabinet across the hall from the sleigh: a glassed-in archive of grit and grace. It holds Japanese porcelain Geisha dolls, a lotus shoe from China worn by a woman whose feet had been bound to toddler size, Depression glass, and carved figurines of horn, jade, and ivory. Nothing matches—it didn’t come as a set—but everything tells a story.

She didn’t inherit these things—she acquired them slowly, piece by piece, with commissions she earned selling real estate and insurance, and credit card airline miles. The cabinet is a testimony to what she’d made of her life. It’s delicate and defiant—worldly and domestic. As much about resilience as refinement.

All things considered, I understand why, when someone offered to buy the sleigh before they moved to Arizona, she would not hear of it. Dad pushed gently, but she was an immovable object.

This is how their marriage worked. He’d spent a lifetime knowing which fights to pick and which ones to let go, while she’d spent a lifetime curating her sense of self through objects. Refusing to sell the sleigh wasn’t just about sentiment—it was a refusal to let go of what it had cost her to get here. And to really understand what it took—to appreciate this sleigh as more than an ornament—we have to go to the beginning of their lives together.

From Barstow to the Bonus Room

My first home was a drafty rental duplex in Barstow, California, likely subsidized by my grandparents. Dad was still in high school then, hustling through a string of entry-level jobs—selling Fuller Brushes and Cutco Cutlery door-to-door, anything to get a foothold. He later earned a union apprenticeship with the Santa Fe railroad and even took community college classes in mechanical drawing. But his sights weren’t on railroads. He wanted to be a businessman. Collecting payments for a finance company gave him his opening, and soon that job granted him the transfer east that would tie our lives to Mom’s family.

Their first house came in a sweetheart deal from Mamaw and Papaw, but what they built inside it was pure mid-century hustle. Mom turned the basement into a dog grooming salon, and Dad sold insurance from a booth in the local Sears department store for Allstate. At night, our living room filled with laughter and catalogs as she hosted Tupperware parties, Sarah Coventry jewelry showings, and whatever new multi-level craze one of her friends had taken up. They returned the favor when she sold Decorama on the party plan and she eventually achieved enough success that she gave up grooming poodles and schnauzers in the basement.

Days were for packing orders, hustling referrals, and corralling three kids on a shoestring, while Dad’s reputation—and his insurance commissions—slowly grew.

As the eldest, and a perceptive little observer, I remember the tough times. I’ve already mentioned riding a horse, which might sound out of step with our hand-to-mouth years. In truth, Papaw bought her for a song after she scarred her leg on barbed wire and the owners didn’t want her anymore. He kept her on his farm, and I loved her. A few lessons and a 4-H group taught me the rest. Riding wasn’t a luxury; it was another example of how we stretched scraps into something that looked like more.

College was next. I attended with the help of Pell grants and a modest student loan of $2500 (which was actually possible in America once upon a time). Just as I left for good—hungry to build something of my own, something that didn’t rely on keeping up appearances—their hard work finally paid off.

Dad was steady, likeable, the kind of man people trusted with their policies and their worries. Mom hustled and charmed. By the time I finished high school, they had bought a Baskin-Robbins franchise, which she ran. After I left for college, she turned to real estate and before long was outselling everyone else in her brokerage. And once I was grown and gone, she became an Allstate agent herself.

They were a great team: Mom the enthusiast, Dad the steady hand. Clients liked having both personalities at the helm and called on either of them, not just the man of the agency. Together, they traveled the world on sales-promotion junkets—not just because Dad won them, but because Mom did too, in her own right. Step by step, her hustle carried her from dogs to party plans, to ice cream, to real estate, then to insurance. As a child I expected it as if her energy had no limit. Only later did I see the extraordinary woman she was.

Her vigor and his steadiness, woven together over decades, left their imprint not just on their clients’ lives but on the rooms they live in now. When you pass the sleigh and curio cabinet in the foyer, the décor begins to conform to expectations—a great room with a kitchen island, high ceilings, carefully styled seating zones. One wall of glass frames a patio worthy of a lifestyle magazine. The granite counter is spotless. A seasonal towel lies perfectly folded by the sink. The air carries a faint scent of lemon polish—and something else, harder to place. Not just cleanliness. Not just pride. The illusion of ease, built on my mother’s unrelenting work—steadied all along by my dad’s quiet hand.

The Buddha Bowl Moment

Over the next eleven days, I practiced the art of hanging around—helping, observing, trying not to be impatient or judgmental. Every corner of this house says stability. Every drawer is in order. But beneath the neatness was a quiet unraveling.

Mom had spent the better part of a week getting the guest room ready for me. Not just buying fresh sheets and arranging flowers on the nightstand—she’d organized its closet within an inch of its life. Labeled bins, lined-up hangers, a beautiful new basket for extra blankets.

I’d barely rested my travel bags on the floor when she asked, “Did I send you a picture of the Christmas closet?” Of course she did, by email and text. I unclenched my teeth. Followed her from room to room, nodding, admiring the changes she’d made since my last visit, keeping my voice warm.

These decorating and organizational projects weren’t just chores. They were proof. That she still had her flair for hospitality. That she wasn’t losing ground. That if everything had a place, maybe she did too.

For years, I rolled my eyes at this sort of thing—her obsession with tidiness, her refusal to rest. But this time, I saw something else: a woman quietly, stubbornly fighting back the tide.

Which brings me to the Buddha Bowl.

We were out on the patio after a lunch of roasted vegetables in an improvised Buddha Bowl. I was trying to get my parents hooked on them. Mom had slipped back into the house—like a wraith—to answer the call of the clothes dryer. One thing led to another—per usual—and she was gone for a while. I went looking and found her fussing with something on her phone.

“C’mon outside, Mom. We’re having all the fun without you.”

“Okay, just let me finish deleting this junk mail.”

Dad and I were laughing over some ancient shared memory when she came through the door, threw her hands up, and said through gritted teeth, “Am I losing it?”

Dad and I thought she was joking. Who hasn’t asked themselves that question?

I said, “We all are, Mom. Come over here and tell us about it.” I figured she couldn’t find a bill. Or the stapler. She’s often juggling the physical mail too.

She looked directly at me, her eyes suddenly sharp with defiance. “You’ve been here. You’ve seen me. I’m asking you seriously: Am I losing it?”

That moment lingered as I did the mental calculus of being honest in a gentle spirit that might reach her. I took a breath. “I couldn’t manage your life if I tried. Your house is huge, your cleanliness standards are hospital-grade, and you always have a new project on the horizon. Things would slip for me if I tried to do everything you do, Mom.”

I’d spent much of my adult life dodging the gravitational pull of their homes—densely curated, thick with meaning. But here I was, trying to be present, to be kind, to bear witness without condoning the burden she lovingly bore.

She looked at me like an earnest little dog, tilting her head as if trying to take it all in. Maybe she did take it all in. Maybe dogs do. I dunno.

Missed, Misread, Misjudged

It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to tell me something. The rambling conversations. The long-winded updates that never got to a point. The odd tangents about Costco rotisserie chicken or whether a neighbor’s Christmas lights were LED or incandescent. I’d been annoyed with her rambling for years because, honestly, annoyance is my go-to emotion for her. I told myself she was too chatty. A little self-absorbed.

I never considered that she couldn’t follow the thread sometimes. That she couldn’t track a conversation the way she used to. That the constant verbal stream wasn’t about me, or our dynamic, or even the topic—it was about her grasp slipping.

But instead of seeing it, I chalked it up as another idiosyncrasy. Sometimes I’m a real a*****e.

Soon enough, the topic pivoted from Mom’s organizational accomplishments back to the rhythm of ordinary conversation. Dad, steady as ever, quietly resumed his role as ballast for Mom’s ship on stormy seas. “How about that Christmas closet? She poured everything she had into that.”

Dad’s never been into the keepsakes and multiple sets of dinnerware. But he’s always been a realist. He doesn’t like seeing her run herself ragged, but he also knows that trying to get her to do something against her will—like downsizing—will only unsettle her more. So he waits in love.

He may not think about it this way, but deep down he must know he benefited from the social gender roles of his generation. No one questioned his long hours or his emotional distance while she clipped poodles in the basement, yelled at kids to go play outside, and pulled together a meager meal of leftovers. He wasn’t lazy—he was following the model handed to him, the one that said a good man worked hard and didn’t interfere.

Dad’s choose-your-battles philosophy may have been forged in love, but it was tempered in the fire of cultural permission. That strategy—his long fuse, his quiet endurance—is probably what kept our family from going under.

But none of that—the roles, the rhythms, the unspoken bargains—diminishes the choice he makes every day: to be there in the way she needs him now.

He holds the ladder, installs the shelving, troubleshoots the tech. Not just support, but devotion—expressed in power tools and patience.

This house, though—it’s hers. Her museum of memory. Her fortress of proof. And yet, she couldn’t do it without him. Nearly every project she dreams up—of which there are always dozens—requires his time, his tools, his stamina. He’s tired, but he keeps going. Because staying busy steadies her. Because his labor wards off the moment when she might ask—again—Am I losing it?

And so, the house becomes theirs—not by aesthetic, not by equal affection for it—but by the quiet agreement that holding her up is his way of holding on.

And me? I’m learning that staying close doesn’t have to mean giving myself away. That presence—offered freely, not out of duty or defense—isn’t just a gift to them. It’s a radical shift in me. One that’s been a long time coming.

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Back at Gila Valley Feed & Hardware Store, while I waited for Deborah and Clayton to open the Simpson Hotel, I had momentarily considered pressing on to Globe, two hours northwest of Duncan.

I ran the idea past the hardware proprietor and his eyebrows shot up. “That’s not a good road at this time of day,” he warned. Highway 70 runs through the San Carlos Apache Reservation, and evening brings a higher risk of collisions—cars, elk, and free-roaming horses.

I’m glad I waited. The road I took the next morning rose and fell through a series of cool, pine-shadowed elevations before opening onto wide golden valleys flanked by soft red buttes. These are not show-off mountains; they provide a landscape that calms your pulse. What I most remember was the air—crisp, fresh, and blissfully free of chemicals or grit.

My journey that day would be blessedly short after so many in a row that topped 250 or 300 miles. I’d arranged to meet Mom and Dad—along with JJ’s daughter Bebe—at a little restaurant just off the highway they were coming in on. They were late. Of course.

Timing as a Family Trait

Time management had always been a struggle for our family as I grew up. Part of it was Dad, who consistently underestimated what was required before takeoff. But most of it was Mom, who refused to leave the house in a mess—or with a plugged-in curling iron. I think this was common among women of her generation, the same cohort that worried about being in a car wreck with dirty underwear.

She used to have this little tic of flicking the light switches in each room multiple times before we left. To make sure the lights would stay off? She never could explain it.

I became an adult who doesn’t want to waste perfectly productive time that I could be doing something interesting. Why arrive half an hour early when the only thing to do is wait? “On time” means you’re there at the appointed time.

I bet you can anticipate this next marital revelation: for Matt, “on time” means “almost late.”

Anyhow, I arrived at our meetup ten minutes early and called to see not if they were late, but by how much. I had to wade through Mom’s story about a missed turn and road construction and something about signage before finally getting the bottom line from twenty-year-old Bebe in the back seat: “Grammy, tell her we won’t be there for another forty minutes.”

Whew. Thanks for cutting to the chase, Bebe.

Listening with New Ears

This was the first time I’d get to know Bebe as a young woman. She’d always been present at family gatherings, but as the youngest adult, she was often edged out by the louder voices and long-established rhythms of the oldsters. Now, here she was—riding shotgun with her grandparents, quick with a straight answer in a calm tone. And for the first time, I wasn’t just watching her grow up—I was listening to who she was becoming.

I’d only had a bite of toast with tea that morning—my stomach still hovering somewhere between East Coast and Central time. When I’d learned they’d be forty minutes late, I went ahead and ordered. Chef salad, hold the croutons. I didn’t need to start the reunion hangry, especially when I was already teetering between old habits and new understanding.

When I’d finished, I still had time to call the Phoenix BMW dealership to get an appointment for a new back tire and a general checkup before making the long trip back east. And let the record show I am not relieved when faced with a chirpy recorded message saying, “...our menu items have changed” and “...we are experiencing unprecedented call volume at this time.” Trust me, businesses, after decades of listening to this script, we’ve memorized it.

I was on interminable hold with the dealership when I saw my family come through the front door. I’d already claimed a corner booth and stood so they’d see me. Bebe stayed behind Dad to hold the door for Mom. I pointed to my earbuds and blew them kisses, letting them know I couldn’t greet them properly just yet.

Dad reached me first and gave me the side-hug we’ve all adapted when the other person is on the phone. I was relieved to see he’d lost a bit of his paunch since his Type 2 diabetes diagnosis and Metformin prescription. When he was in his thirties, strangers sometimes asked if he was Johnny Carson, the late night host of The Tonight Show. I didn’t know who Johnny Carson was as a kid, but the resemblance is unmistakable, even today.

Mom entered looking a bit unfocused and Bebe pointed out our table. Mom gave me a little wave and made a beeline for the restroom. She’s always been a scrupulous hand washer before meals—a ritual that once felt like good manners and now feels like an anchor.

I watched her go, trying to read the cues—was she road weary or was it something more?

The Evaluator’s Dilemma

Noticing her hand-washing ritual made me realize I’d developed a new habit I hate to acknowledge: scanning for signs, tallying what’s changed since last time. I don’t want to be her evaluator. I want to be her daughter. Figuring out how to be both was my next frontier.

Then there’s Bebe—sharp-eyed, steady, scanning the table like a mission brief. She gave me a side-hug with a little bounce and slid into my side of the booth, already reaching for the QR code menu before anyone else even sat down.

While waiting for Mom to return from the restroom, my call finally made it to the top of the dealership’s phone queue. I stepped outside so I could hear the service rep—no way I wanted to go back into the queue again.

When I came back, everyone was seated, and the waitress was taking drink orders. Mom beamed her signature smile—the one her father taught her back when he was an itinerant pony photographer, circa 1945. Papaw went door to door with a pinto pony and a dress-up kit: chaps, toy pistols, a cowboy vest. Kids posed on the saddle while he captured the moment.

That’s where Mom learned it—that perfectly composed, show-ready grin that can light up a football stadium. She’s always had movie star teeth and never needed veneers.

Everyday Grace Notes

The waitress left to fetch their drinks and I got to hear about the drive again. Missed turns, delays, and who said what about when they should have left. I stopped myself from doing the eye roll, even an internal one. Annoyance had no place in our new reality.

As the waitress came our way with a tray of beverages, Bebe nudged, “Grammy, did you figure out what you want to eat yet?”

That was my first clue about her sixth sense with Mom.

Mom startled, like she’d just been roused from a quick doze, and turned to Dad. “I dunno, Jim. Wanna split something?”

I saw it for what it was. Overload. Too many voices. Too much menu. Too many steps between intention and action. And even though I tried not to catalog what I was seeing, I couldn’t help it.

I knew what was coming. Mom’s dining protocol has always started with inspecting the silverware. Something is usually found lacking. This time, it was her coffee spoon. She held it up, tilted it toward the light, turned it in her fingers like she was reading a label.

In earlier years, she might’ve flagged the waitress and suggested someone in the back needed retraining. This time, she said nothing. Just reached across and took Dad’s spoon instead, which—miraculously—passed the test. After decades of watching her run the table, now she seemed to be navigating it instead.

Dad had acknowledged her taking the spoon with a smile that wordlessly said, “Glad that one works, sweetheart.”

Later, after we’d paid the bill, Bebe pulled out her phone. “Okay,” she said, “so here’s what I was thinking...”

Neither of us had known the other had done homework on Globe and nearby Miami, but we’d landed on almost the exact same list of sights and destinations. We laughed at the unanimity of it.

I handed her the virtual baton. “Hey Bebe, what if you mapped out the next two days based on where we are right now? Group things by geography—maximize time, minimize zigzags.”

“You got it, Aunt Tam!” she said, already scrolling.

It was such a small thing, but I felt it—relief, admiration, and a little quiet joy. She was our backstop.

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Descending the piney heights of Ruidoso, New Mexico, I left the cool shadow of the Lincoln National Forest and came into the wide-open hush of the desert. The air warmed. The land flattened. Green gave way to gold. Within an hour, I was skirting the blinding dunes of White Sands, a surreal stretch of gypsum desert that looks more like snowdrifts than sandbanks.

From there, I followed long, empty roads across southern New Mexico, the terrain widening into the northern fringe of the Chihuahuan Desert—wind-scoured basins, distant mesas, and that particular kind of silence you only find in places where very little grows. As I curved toward Duncan, Arizona, the land softened. The Gila River had carved out just enough fertility for agriculture to make this valley prosper—until labor politics and immigration enforcement began to unravel that legacy.

As I rolled into Duncan, population 670, I had my heart set on the Simpson Hotel—an old place I’d flagged during route planning, promising charm and character. But when I got there, the door was locked. No note. No lights on inside. A black cat blinked her yellow eyes serenely through the storefront window, unperturbed, even when I cupped my hands around my face to see if anyone else was at home.

The Door Was Locked, But I Stayed

Some travelers would’ve taken the hint and left town right then. But I wanted to sleep in the classic territorial building that opened its doors in 1914 as the Hotel Hobbs.

I shrugged out of my riding jacket and sauntered across the street to the Gila Valley Feed & Hardware. Its facade is classic midcentury: a long stretch of front-facing windows framed in aluminum, beneath a flat blue awning that shaded the sidewalk just enough. Inside, I found a display of Case knives, horse halters and riding gear, and the kind of handwritten signage that tells you everything you need to know:

Discontinued—get ’em while they last.

Back-ordered, but Amazon doesn’t have them either.

I quickly identified the proprietor, a slim man wearing the desert uniform of boots, jeans, snap shirt, and cowboy hat. “They were here earlier,” he said, when I asked about the hotel owners. “Probably just out for a bit.”

He offered me a chair by the window, and customers came and went—there was a big run on black sunflower seeds that afternoon.

Thanks to the imprint of road magic on my early life as Buckskin, a missing innkeeper was nothing to be alarmed by—at least not yet. I still get a thrill from pulling into a new town, from the promise of unknown cafés and creaky beds to conversations with strangers. Younger people who never grew up road-tripping—they fly everywhere, rent a car, then fly out—will never get the chance to experience these thrills.

Road Magic and a Question from Home

When I texted Matt and my grown boys a picture of the hotel’s facade, his vigilant response was instant: Are you sure this is a good idea?

I was. I’d seen enough to trust the place—and the hardware store owner, who had already started calling around town to see if anyone else had seen the hotel’s owners, wasn’t giving me the side-eye or nudging me toward the next town down the road.

I watched the hotel the way you watch someone napping in a sunbeam—quietly, without worry. I occasionally glanced up from a game I played on my iPad, but I didn’t feel stuck—I felt rooted.

Eventually, a dusty white minivan pulled into view, and out stepped Deborah and Clayton, owners of the Simpson. They’d been a few towns over buying a water heater and thanked me for waiting.

Deborah got my room ready with air-dried linens and a thoughtful touch in every corner. As she worked her magic indoors, Clayton and I sat in the garden, enveloped in the scent of desert dusk after he’d watered the herbs and roses. His garden is a patchwork sanctuary—half desert whimsy, half outsider art installation. Cats lounged on sun-warmed stones and slipped through gaps in the walls like smoke, except for Malachy, the queen of them all. She took her rightful place on my lap and permitted me to stroke her beautiful gray tortoiseshell back.

When I texted Matt a photo of her in a state of bliss, he replied: You’ve found heaven.

Tableaus made of found objects peeked out from the shade of olive trees and vines. One corner featured a mural with a wide-eyed face and a Latin phrase painted in red: Hic habitat felicitas—“Here lives happiness.” And for that night, it was a truth.

A Past Adventure, a Shift in Dad

After a shower and shampoo, I saw I’d missed a text from Dad. “Where are you? Did you land okay or are you still on the road? What’d you see today?”

He was concerned about my safety, of course—but more than that, he was emotionally invested in the journey itself. What it meant to me. This was a turning point in our recent history—it had been a dozen years since we last traveled together.

Back in 2013, I was promoting a book I’d written, and the tour brought me to Las Vegas, where Mom and Dad had a winter home. After my speech and book signing, I stayed on for a few days, and the three of us—Mom, Dad, and me—decided to visit Death Valley National Park. I was born a couple of hours from there, in Barstow, California, which is also in the Mojave Desert. Desert people love a desert vacation.

As the skies began to purple over an area called Racetrack Playa, the dry lakebed where the famous sailing stones are found, we consulted our map for a shortcut back to The Atomic Inn motel. Thinking we’d found one, we followed an unmarked gravel road. We took a promising fork, then another. Each fork seemed to lead forward—until the road simply gave out in a desert cul-de-sac, the gas gauge dropping fast.

I remember the relief when we finally rolled into a gas station on fumes. But I also remember the laughter. We’d come close to being rattled, but never tipped into panic. We were alive in that particular way only a brush with real consequences can deliver.

We made it,” Dad said, shaking his head like it was the most fun he’d had in years. And it was. Even Mom—who, as you recall, hates a gas gauge under half—kept her cool.

That was when they were still game—curious, hungry for experience. I didn’t know it then, but I’d miss that version of them. I’d carried that version with me—hoping it would flicker back.

So when Dad later said, “We’re done road-tripping, Sweetheart,” it landed hard. The part of them that once said yes had started saying no.

But something shifted in Duncan. Dad couldn’t get enough of the Simpson Hotel, asking questions, imagining possibilities like meeting there for a family reunion. It felt like the tide was turning. Just a little.

Maybe he was beginning to see himself differently. Not as someone who’d stopped, but someone who could still start again.

I hated to cut him off when he was enjoying his tour of the Simpson’s garden, but dinner was non-negotiable—”a must is a must,” as he used to say.

“Dad, I’ve got to get something to eat. There’s a pizza place in town, but it closes in half an hour.”

I walked fifty paces to Humble Pie, a no-frills pizza joint painted the same dusty blue as the evening sky. The sign was hand-cut, the windows a little fogged, and there was no dining room—just a flickering OPEN sign and the warm smell of melted cheese and oregano. The pizza wasn’t transcendent, but it was hot, honest, and sustaining—just like the place itself. In a town with few options, it was exactly what it needed to be.

Holding Space for Contradiction

I brought my pepperoni-mushroom back, then I had my hosts all to myself. We spent the evening talking. Clayton had been part of Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd in New York, while Deborah came from civil rights roots—her father had marched in Selma. They were artists and thinkers and caretakers of a place that could’ve crumbled, but instead vibrated with life.

As the evening deepened, so did the conversation. We talked about the state of small towns since the pandemic, how even places like Duncan—places you might think would be insulated—had absorbed the same divisive currents as everywhere else. They spoke of neighbors with warmth and history, but also with weariness—the kind that comes from trying to hold a community together across painful differences brought on by COVID and a bitter political climate. There was no neat bow on that part of the conversation. No need for speeches. Just the shared reality that goodness and ignorance, love and prejudice, often live uncomfortably close together.

The evening reminded me that the road doesn’t just offer escape—it offers perspective. And sometimes, the balm of conversation is to simply sit with the contradiction.

The next morning, I took some photos of the garden, patted the two bronze javelinas that flanked the front door for good luck, and made the turn for the old mining town of Globe, about a hundred miles away in the Sonoran Desert. Headed north on Highway 70, I held a quiet gratitude for that magical evening with my new friends.

My night at the Simpson Hotel was a reminder that stillness has its own pace, that solitude isn’t the same as loneliness, and that sometimes, the road leads you exactly where you need to be—if you’re willing to stop. And wait.

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From Roswell, I took Highway 380 west, eventually merging with 70. Somewhere near Picacho, New Mexico, I laughed out loud in my helmet.

The name reminded me of when my boys were little and obsessed with the Pokémon card game and cartoon. One of the characters—Pikachu—sounded close enough to this dusty town to trigger a flood of memories.

Grammyland and Pikachu

I thought about the endless games, the breathless show-and-tell moments, the way their entire world could be held in a plastic binder. My mom never learned to play the game with them, but she made sure they had stacks of cards and a place to spread out.

We live in North Carolina and my parents lived in Ohio at that time. Mom and Dad would take the boys for summer breaks and school holidays, and the boys came to call it Grammyland—part chaos, part Disneyland, and all love. Swimming, karate, zoo trips, meals served in front of the TV (which their mean mother would never allow).

Later, when my parents moved to a Las Vegas suburb, the spoiling continued for a few more years—until the boys hit middle school and decided they’d rather spend summers at camp or with their friends. But for a while there, it was magic. The love they feel for each other still is.

Soon after Picacho the land started to rise—slowly at first, then with more intention. The scrub opened into something greener, the sky still stretched wide, but the road itself was changing—more curves, more climb, more places where you could feel the temperature drop by a few degrees in the span of a mile.

Horses and the Harder Truths

Civilization became more dense when I passed Ruidoso Downs, a Quarter Horse racetrack tucked right against the edge of town. Even from the road, I could see the grandstands and the long, narrow oval stretching into the distance. I was always what’s called a “horsey girl,” reading any book with a horse on the cover and riding a chestnut mare over fences—back when my parents paid for it.

Most of what I know of racing is from the Thoroughbred world, where off-the-track horses could end up in show barns, if they’re lucky. Very lucky.

Quarter Horse racing has its own version of that same throwaway ethic as all blood sports: breed many, discard most. The industry lauds horses in marketing as “noble beasts,” which they certainly are, but the reality belies the pretty language. When speed is the only thing that counts, animals that fall short are often quietly “wasted” to use the industry euphemism. I didn’t dwell on it as I passed by, but I felt it in my gut.

Ruidoso's landscape doesn’t shout the way the Rockies do. It doesn’t roll like the Appalachians either, lush and layered and humming with green. The Sacramento Mountains, a high-desert range shaped by tectonic stretching, created uplifted blocks and dropped valleys. The cliff faces reminded me of a microscopic picture of a man’s curly beard with plenty of skin between the follicles. They’re high enough to catch snow and satisfy winter sports fans, rising out of the high desert like something coiled and watchful.

I was completely under the spell of the mountains—so much so that I could overlook the fact that the town itself was an upscale tourist trap, catering to visitors with art budgets. But the setting? Unbelievable.

​​A Room with a Ridgeline

Dad called just as I’d checked into my room at the Hotel Ruidoso. I’d snapped a photo of the closest ridgeline and texted it to him, but that wasn’t enough. “Let’s FaceTime,” he said. So I stepped outside and walked around with the camera pointed uphill, letting him catch the way the light caught the folds of the mountains.

He felt the romance too. His face lit up like he could feel the air through the screen. I think we both needed that.

The next morning over breakfast, I was surrounded by a high school golf team from Carlsbad, New Mexico. The kids created an air of palpable drama. I couldn’t tell who was flirting with whom or who was icing someone out, but it was happening. Growing up in the pre-digital age, we were much noisier than these kids, who were texting each other instead of speaking.

I took one look and thought, Thankfully I’m not raising teenagers anymore. I was really bad at it, as you’ll eventually learn.

This was the point when I started noticing sports teams in all my hotels. Year-end school tournaments, I guess. We never traveled overnight for high school sports. Not even the boys’ teams. I know, I know—community spirit and all that—but I’ve got opinions. Bigger sports budgets shouldn’t come before smaller class sizes or paying teachers what they’re worth. Do all parents think their kid will get a college scholarship? Is that what this sports boom is about? Given the price of tuition, I can see where they’d at least give it a try.

I rolled out of Ruidoso feeling good. I wasn’t in a rush. The air was cool and the road called softly. I had a reservation waiting in Duncan, Arizona—a town I picked half on instinct, half on the promise of a decent bed and no chain stores.

When the Sky Breaks Open

I never would have guessed that three months later, the same ridgeline I’d FaceTimed to Dad would be on the national news—flash‑flood sirens, mud in the streets, three lives lost. The Rio Ruidoso rose from just under two feet to over twenty in less than an hour.

Three years ago, I’d been in a similar situation in eastern Kentucky, where I attend a writer’s workshop each summer. We’d experienced rain off and on all week, but somewhere between one and two in the morning of July 28, the area experienced a 1,000-year rainfall event. This doesn't mean it only happens every 1,000 years, but rather it is a statistical term describing the low probability of such an intense rainfall. The waters had nowhere to go, trapped between ridges just hundreds of feet apart.

Troublesome Creek, which bisects the Hindmen Settlement School’s campus rose more than twenty feet, taking my motorcycle with it. The program director had woken me up to say I should try to save it—only three months old—but by the time I reached it, the water had risen high and fast. I barely jumped to safety before my bike tilted and floated away with the current. Hindman is a small town of 600, with 39 of them losing their lives that night.

I know what floodwater smells like, especially when it’s been sitting in ditches for a week—ripe with rot and diesel and the lives it swept up. I didn’t lose my life in Kentucky. Just a bike. But I carry that night with me—a reminder of how quickly the ground can shift.

Not just under my tires. Not just in the forecast.

Just… everywhere.

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