Returning to an old house and finding some peace

On a beautiful Sunday morning I walked through the sagebrush with a friend to show her where I used to live many years ago ... a larger than life adobe structure on a hill overlooking Taos Valley in Northern New Mexico.  I lived there for many years with someone I thought I loved, and who I tried like hell to have love me.   It was a rich, dark, and turbulent time.

Life in northern New Mexico was about as different from my San Francisco experience as possible, but I was intoxicated with the new possibilities:  teaching young Hispanic kids to write, making beaded jewelry, and tending my tribe of rescued cats and dogs, and finding meditation practice.  I had left behind what had looked like a normal marriage and family life because love there had gone stale...  I tried not to be disturbed by the rampant violence against women so common in poverty stricken areas like Taos, and all the young kids driving drunk and dying, and I taught with all my heart, and I reached people.  And I began to see inside myself.  But there was one person I couldn't reach, the one who seemed to matter the most.  For thirteen years or so I tried, as my skin suffered in the killing dryness of high altitude air and I looked to the big sky and imagined it was like my beloved Pacific Ocean, and I called home every once in a while to reinstate my connection to my grown daughters.

It was a hard time, yes.  Painful time.  And I never found that love.  At some point, I can't remember when, there was that proverbial last straw, the light bulb flashed and I was finally able to let him go so I could forge ahead alone and find myself.  Back to San Francisco and the cool sea air, good espresso, and familiar smelling streets.  And as I settled into my new life, New Mexico gradually became fainter in my memory.  I didn't miss the perfume of the sagebrush, the startling magpies, or even the brilliant skies and the great Taos mountain.  I missed my dear friends, but told myself that was just life.  Gradually, I held the dark New Mexico years more lightly and began to let go of those old dreams.  He died, this man I loved, some years later, and I was both surprised and deeply saddened.    Another piece of the past was now irrevocably gone, though the images of his crooked smile and impossible charm still lurked.

Last Sunday when I walked about the house that I helped to build and lived in for so many years I was facing it for the first time since I had left, and instead of feeling chilled by old memories or regrets, I felt I was standing in front of something beautiful that I had helped create.  My friend and I admired the adult birch trees all around and the gravesite of one of our wild and wonderful dogs, talking idly and breathing in the dry air.  Even after two days my lungs were still trying to adjust to 7000 feet, and my skin was drawing tighter and tighter across my face...  She bent down and found a small relic in the dirt, and she said, "Hey Mag, this must be yours!"  A small wooden carving of a bodhisattva figure, one half of a little portable shrine from somewhere in Asia.  So soft and weathered and pale in the bright sun.  She handed it to me and I said, "yes, mine."  How many years had that been laying on the dry earth by the house, fading into the dust?  I put the piece in my pocket, and took one last look inside my old house.  It was very dark in there ... it felt abandoned and neglected now ... I wanted to imagine some future inhabitants filling up the cavernous space.  I felt a whiff of sadness at the forlornness of this once grand place, but I wasn't caught by the unsettling, unresolved stories of my early years; I realized I had come home, and it was just fine the way it was.  Home for just a few more minutes on this Sunday morning...

We've both just become older, the house and I, I realized as I bumped on down the dirt road, and I breathed that in, and wasn't afraid.