in high country

This is the last of three days Mark and I are spending in Flagstaff and I am just beginning to unbundle some of the personal and professional issues that have been held tight inside since coming back from my ankle injury. I could use a full month, at least, to ruminate on what has been inside but we are hitting the road, winding our way back through Oak Creek Canyon, getting on the "other side" of Phoenix rush hour traffic, before returning to the desert. He takes off tomorrow morning for a week in Denver and, besides the mail and daily newspapers piling up on the counter, I will have solo duties to take on for the next week. Wisely, we opted for dog-walking help early in the mornings so I, at least, won't have to risk walking with Lia as she does her daily "I still feel like a puppy" journey through the desert (and then pants and rests throughout the day because, at almost 11, she is NOT a puppy).

The Grand Canyon on Wednesday was, as anyone who has been there knows, grand. Each time we go we experience something different; it is an ever-changing, still work in progress, magical experience. This time, Mark caught a photo, perfectly framed, of a condor flying over the Canyon, close to Kolb's studio. It's wingspan was wider than my arms outstretched. We were giddy with the joy of its soaring on the thermals and celebrated with our first dinner at El Tovar, seated at a table by the window. Although I couldn't do the kind of walking we have been used to in our last couple of visits, I was grateful I could walk and smell the pinon pines, see the red and white sandstone and listen to the languages of the visitors as they strolled on the edge of the vastness. We met a fellow from the UK who lives in Holland and was in Paris last week. I heard German, a lot of French, and a little Italian. Japanese visitors wore shaded hats and used lace-lined umbrellas to shade their faces from the sun. I learned in a previous reading that it's a sign of "peasant class" to have browned skin in Asia; i.e. white skin is the color of the preferred class. I guess Rep. John Boehner wouldn't score very high in their culture (or in mine, for that matter).

Yesterday, I walked by myself (a first outside of Tucson my-neighborhood walking) from the hotel to Beaver St. and a cute thrift shop where I bought a four dollar nice pair of capris. I lounged at a cafe for lunch, eating a delicious grilled cheese sandwich and watching controlled burn smoke clouds gather in the south. The air up here smells strongly of burnt wood. On the way back from the Canyon, we pulled over outside of Williams and saw the starry sky. The Milky Way stretched from Southwest to Northeast in the sky and constellations were burnishing the black with silvery brightness: so this is how close we are in the universe, I thought to myself--a reality lost in urban lighting and too busy lives.

I am open to an epiphany, I said to myself this morning over a solitary breakfast. While I am busy with local work, my heart isn't in it. I wept yesterday, after finishing (read it in two days), Elizabeth Berg's "Until the Real Thing Comes Along". It was another layer of daughter-grief coming to the surface, triggered by the story line of the main character's mother developing Alzheimer's. She (the mother-character)developed into a girlish senility as mom did and it was heartbreaking (again) to recall how, at the end of mom's life, she just wanted me to read "Heidi" to her. There was this canyon-size gulf between us and yet, the story itself, the reading of Heidi, Grandfather, Peter and the goats that spanned the distance between daughter and mother, awareness and dementia, life and death.

So, while in the high country, I have marveled at nature's majesty, savored solitude, and grieved. Maybe there is a subtle transformational power in the three days over thirty. I hope so for it's what I have for now: it needs to be enough.