Dinner tonight was sautéed red cabbage, scallions, bacon, diced potatoes, cumin, garlic, and a braised egg on top. When you have to do everything on a single burner hot plate, your methods get Asian pretty fast. I come by it honestly, and also it is imposed.
Where were we? Roswell? (Yawn... no aliens except us.) Between Roswell and Austin, which is where we are right now, there was a little bit of New Mexico and a whole lotta Texas, and that was only half of Texas.
Let's backtrack to Arizona for a moment, though. Fairbank Historical Township. It's roughly four or five still-standing buildings, one of which is a two-seater outhouse (my phone wants to auto-correct this to a two-sweater outhouse, which may not be inaccurate this time of year), and a cemetery on a hill. The cemetery is a two mile walk down an overgrown dirt road from the township proper, and we walked it and agreed that this is the sort of place horror films are spawned in the imaginations of city slickers like us who have no clue what all those noises in the woods are.
The most recent headstone was from the 1800s, but most graves were marked by simple crosses, some only with piles of stone. I was starting to get a sty, so I took a stone (no, not off a grave... sheesh. I'm irreverent, not a godless a-hole). My old-school eye doctor prescribes boiling a rock and wrapping that hot stone in a washcloth and using it as a warm compress. My new-school eye doctor prescribes antibiotic eye goo. I say when my eye feels like a headache and looks kind of like a hum bao (which is delicious, by the way), I throw everything I've got at it and hope it stays sunny for a few days so I can wear sunglasses while I have goo and hot rocks in my eye. Luckily, our cemetery hiking day was like this:
Back to New Mexico, then. I only personally know one person from New
Mexico, and it is not a wonder at all she got out. Friendly folk, the New
Mexicans we encountered, if a bit over-imaginative and not at all imaginative
at the same time. As we drove through the desert, consciously but not
purposefully avoiding any towns that may have been culturally noteworthy, we
encountered a sign that read WARNING: DUST STORMS MAY EXIST. Cheers,
Andra, for envisioning a smart and sassy world of hot pink stilettos and
computer programming and then making that a reality (and marrying a fireman. I
know... he has a name; it's The Fireman, right? And yours is The Goddess
Divine, and now everyone knows it). Dust storms may, in fact, exist, but not
where you live, lady.
West Texas smells icky like they are pulling the ancient liquified bones and blood of dinosaurs out from below the earth's crust using giant steel grasshoppers as work slaves, probably because that is exactly what is happening. It stinks and stinks and stinks and then all of a sudden you are in the pretty part of Texas where the cows and sheep and goats and deer are wandering around acting very cute and delicious and the sunsets are like whoa.
Texas does not mess around when it comes to beef jerky. I'll say no more. I can't because my eyes are rolling back into my head right now.
Last night we stayed at the Peach Tree Inn in Fredericksburg, TX. I have renamed it the Sweetest Little Place You'll Ever Wish You Had Not Tried To Cook Dinner Inn.
That's me preparing dinner on the bed because there was nowhere else to do it. I'm either smiling or crying. That was approximately 428 seconds before I had an emotional breakdown because we have no idea what on God's green earth we are doing roaming around like gypsies (but not so organized) and convinced that Ben couldn't possibly love me with a bad attitude and a sty and--you guessed it--hormone-induced psychosis. Chocolate seems to have no impact on a sty, but worked wonders on my other ailments.
Things are better today, much chocolate, mollifying conversation, and several bouts of hysterical laughter later. We now have a loose plan to move more like nomads and less like fugitives. If you've been following our "plans" for the last few months, you may recognize that our method is more agile than waterfall, which is to say we are gathering requirements and re-prioritizing as we go.
For the next three nights we are in this lovely, kooky little airstream trailer (thanks, airbnb!) with an outdoor claw foot bathtub. This is only one of several adorable trailers for rent in Austin, a town that seems to be just as cool as everyone says it is, but all we want to be is home. We don't know exactly where that is just yet, and the nomads in us know that it won't be permanent--just a place to settle in and make things with our hands until spring comes and we can move north.
We are looking at cities in Louisiana and Georgia, but right now everything about Tucson feels more and more right the farther we drive away from it. In our lives as in software development, requirements-gathering for a better outcome happens incrementally as we implement each new phase. Before we left Seattle I couldn't have known that I wanted to be in a town that feels smaller than it really is, that loves fresh food without being pretentious about it, that makes art to share and use up without ambitions of making it precious or inaccessible. I couldn't have known that warm days and icy cold nights would feel so blissful or that I would fall in love with other people's dogs or that my body (this wretched dog) would feel so healthy in the dry desert air. It will get hot. Too hot to be happy. It's perfect. It is built-in that we will want to leave, to head north eventually, to explore another place where our farmhouse waits to be built or rebuilt.
Who knows where we will end up--Spokane, upstate New York, Savannah,
back in Seattle? Who knows where we will spend the rest of winter? What we
know is that we will spend it working with our hands and moving when it makes
sense, waking up together and being glad about it, gathering more requirements,
and laughing hysterically every day. It's a lot like right now, but somehow
even better.
