Dreams, Moments, Travels
My mother-in-law’s smiling face and her excitement seeing her daughter make these stays with us worth everything “the son-in-law” has to endure. This is her fourth trip to the United States, and she’ll be here only 25 days compared to her previous trip in the year 2000 of 29 days, but still much longer than her first visit back in 1996 when she was here for a mere 14 days. We have big plans for Jutta, with our most adventurous road trip yet mapped out. We leave in a couple of days.
There’s an intimacy here with our belongings that weren’t being had in the condo. Most of what we owned was in places we weren’t living in and, hence, didn’t really see. What I mean is that we spent the majority of our time in our office in front of our computers or our bedroom sleeping when we were at home and so we’d walk right by our stuff.
Here in the loft, we can see almost everything we own from wherever we are. The first photo shows the bookshelf in the background that bisects the room, so our bed, seen above, is in a separate space to a degree. Our bed is a queen-sized futon and suits us fine as we abhor king beds due to the vast distance between us.
Little things like coming home and immediately seeing the pots we bought at the Ute Mountain Pottery shop outside of Cortez, Colorado, make us smile. As for the frog in the background, that plushy had to be put up high in a place where our cat Andy couldn’t jump as he had a thing for it that, while funny at first, got old fast.
While some may find it tragic, this is the hub of where our lives at home revolve. We are addicted to computers, not just the internet but the multitude of things we can do with them around art, coding, organization, and learning. I sit on the right and Caroline on my left. In front of me is our bedroom, seen two photos above, and in front of Caroline, our living room while on her left is our dining room. In a few hours, Jutta will arrive from Frankfurt, Germany, to spend about a month with us. We are about to learn just how livable our space is.
Well, I turned 40 yesterday and so far, no existential crisis is appearing on the horizon. On the contrary, things are terrific, and life is amazing. When I was a kid in the 70s, I used to hear people talk about “mid-life crisis” like it was a form of menopause or cancer. Turns out that maybe being suspicious of the stupidity of adults to glom on to every idiotic, fearmongering bit of nonsense that could justify their anxiety was insightful. Guess I’ll have to see how the next decade rolls out.
This reminds me of the thistle we saw at the ocean last year. Click here to visit that trip.
Can you tell from the lush green colors that we’ve had some spring rains? Trust me, this is lush for the Arizona desert.
We are heading in the general direction of Tucson, following the road for as long as the wildflowers pull us forward.
What’s not to love about these explosions of color? Makes me wonder about how one cultivates that sense of reemergence and new growth as the seasons unfold. Every month should be springtime in our heads, and every day another Saturday.