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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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