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Driving to Abiquiu, my mind circled the idea of being left. My parents were constantly leaving me and my sisters while they toured Italy or Ireland or drove west to stay for an entire month in New Mexico, leaving us with our grandparents. Kevin had traveled for work while I had remained static, stoking those proverbial home fires, welcoming him back with eagerness to hear his stories of the outside world, a magical place free of bottles, diapers, and mundane domestic problems. I had little to tell him about: bottles, diapers, nonsense conversations, coffee with other mommies exiled to baby land while he spoke of terrorists, political negotiations, and staying in nice hotels. I bored myself, so how could I expect Kevin to be enthralled about the tiny world I now inhabited with an incoherent, temperamental being who found dust and his own toes fascinating?

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I ran before the heat arrived, listening to Aimee Mann’s sternly worded music delineating the significance of self-acceptance. Somehow, food was secondary but adequate: a bowl of fruit salad, a pause in the afternoon for more salad, an avocado, dinner, and an afterthought. For the first time in years, I was alone, complete, free of the pull of duty and love, outside of the frame of family, mom, dad, and our kid, alone and grateful, alone and amazed by the strength I felt in my skin and bones, all the senses awake, the fuzz and mist of motherhood banished.

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Just after sunrise, silence was the first wave and then the sounds of birds and small rustles in the trees and bushes that surrounded the Casita. I absorbed the slow unfolding of the morning, standing on my front steps, the air chilled by the desert night, colors that didn’t exist in Dallas, the lilac of the distant mountains, the ochre tones of the closer hills, an explosion of clouds, the sun pushing through, drenching the landscape, sweeping back the moon and stars, nature in all its bossy glory, I had forgotten how to breathe. 

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