At the most recent full moon, on October 13th, I headed out into the Mojave to watch the moon rise.
It’s something I used to do in college. In Provo, I lived within a five-minute drive of several gorgeous hiking trails in the Wasatch Range. I’d park my pickup at a trailhead parking lot, climb into the truck bed, wrap myself in a quilt, and watch the silvery moon calmly slip between the rocky peaks above me to the east. All this without having left the city limits.
“Andersen’s Pea Soup Capital of the World,” I read out loud, staring out the passenger side window at an approaching sign. “Buellton, California – 105 miles.”
“What?” my then-spouse asked, eyes on the road.
“I keep seeing these signs for this famous split pea soup,” I said, gesturing out the window. “It’s quite a claim. I mean, pea soup’s good and all, but—?”
“Yeah, famous?”
“Kinda wish we had time to stop,” I mused. “I’d like to see if it’s worth the hype.” I paused. “It’s even on the way.”
Continue reading “What Strange Luck May Come – Or, The Pea Soup Capital of the World”
My car holds just enough gasoline to get me from Las Vegas, Nevada to Beaver, Utah.
I first learned this when driving from my sister’s place in Vegas to Madison, Wisconsin in 2015. I was almost done with the journey’s I-15 leg, and, as one does, I pulled into the gas station that presented itself at the moment when my gas tank was empty and my bladder full.
And came face-to-face with this:
For my ninth birthday, just weeks before my family left Bangkok, my best friend gave me a sheer pink sash screen-printed with cranes in flight.
This friend was Japanese, but, like me, she’d spent her entire childhood in Thailand. When you’re small, you understand too little of the world to comprehend cultural provenance. You simply absorb. You exist where you exist. You believe you belong until given reason to believe you do not. Continue reading “The Cranes Were Not the Strangers Here”
Prairie-land and I don’t go well together. I ascribe this to my pioneer ancestry. My DNA remembers too many meals cooked over buffalo-chip campfires, and so no matter how expansive the arched cerulean sky, I can’t help feeling trapped in the endlessness rather than freed by it. Too many heirlooms left on the side of the trail. Too many shallow graves.
I am ready for mountains. Continue reading “Welcome to Colorful Colorado!”
