Puerto Penasco, Sonora, Mexico

Sonora is a harshly beautiful place.


These pictures are from a morning trip we took to a biosphere reserve. We drove to see some volcanoes.

Pretty good volcano, huh?

We were impressed. We were also very glad to get back in the car with its lovely air conditioning. Just a couple minutes' walk made you all sweaty, especially if you happened to be the one with a baby.

This is just a part of the group we were with: the "peoples." Not pictured are the "kids." Those were Nathan's names for the groups our houseful naturally devolved into: the teenagers, the young adults, and the family. We weren't sure how a family on vacation with a bunch of single people would go, but it was excellent. A houseful of people who view kids as playthings, so there was nearly always (unfortunately, not at 6 am) someone willing to play with them. Not to mention, a houseful of people to pitch in with cooking and cleaning.

But I digress. A few words about the place we visited:

We went to a small resort town that clings to the ocean for survival: fishing and tourism. The house we stayed in is in a gated community, a narrow strip of elegant houses along the pristine beaches. Across the dirt road that leads to those houses, though, is desert. Dry, hot, desolate desert. The economy and American concerns about safety have hit the town hard. Everywhere, we saw someone's ambitious plans for a new beach house, or a new hotel, a skeleton of a partially-built structure, abandoned. Not so unlike the States, in that respect.

We enjoyed our stay, but we agreed we couldn't go there too often. It's too sad. In America, we live a very basic lifestyle, but it's relative opulence compared to what we saw there. We saw people living in a plywood shack underneath the power lines. We saw a man sleeping by the side of the road, waiting for someone to buy one of his load of watermelons.

What accident of birth or capitalism made us the ones zipping through town in our air-conditioned car, with our plentiful food and clean water to drink? Why do we as Americans feel entitled to a standard of living that is ridiculous compared to the rest of the world? I feel guilty, and lucky, and feel guilty for feeling lucky.

Sandy Face

I loved a girl named Sandyface,
She lived outside of town
In a tent made of diapers
In the sand she laid face down
She had a pillow of cactus
And her bed was desert land
I suppose I called her Sandyface
Because her face was covered in sand

And I remember her sandy face
And I remember her sandy smile

                                                --The Aquabats

I've had this song in my head for a couple of weeks. I just can't imagine why.

Sense of place

I'd never even heard of "sense of place" until I took a class on Wallace Stegner in college. My teacher went on and on about his "sense of place." What does that even mean, I thought?

Well, Stegner does have sense of place. When you read his writing, you're there. The windswept plains of Saskatchewan, the forested isolation of the Northwest, the tenuous place of a bootlegger in Salt Lake City. I've experienced them all, in prose at least.

I'm glad I learned about sense of place, because Arizona has it. In spades. We took Highway 89 down through Utah, which was fun to see new places: Kanab, Glen Canyon Dam, the Navajo reservation, then through the mountains and into Arizona. 

I don't know why, but I was expecting Arizona to be flat. Uniform. Boring. My previous forays into Arizona were mad, sleepy dashes with friends to get through and to our destination before night fell. So the only things I really could remember were: kicking each other on Route 66 (get it?), the city of Surprise (!), and joking with each other about the army of immobile cacti.

Arizona is beautiful. Phoenix is the only city I can think of where I've seen both pines and palms in close proximity. Flagstaff was captivating, and deliciously cool. It smelled like the mountains it was nestled into. The picture above is a cloudburst we drove through on our way down from Flagstaff on our way to Phoenix.

And the place names of Arizona. There are the cities of Surprise, Sedona, Snowflake, Bitter Springs, Bluewater, Carefree, Gila Bend, Hope, and the plaintive Why. We saw signs for Black Gap and Horse Thief Gulch. These names just seem so much more evocative, full of the character of the place, than names in other places. These names have so much "sense of place," if you will.

Appreciating place names is how I kept myself occupied on our two days of driving. We also listened to a book on CD, The Know-it-All, which kind of made us want to buy a set of encyclopedias so we too can become really smart.

And the kids?

The kids, by and large, were amazing. The DVD player we'd brought along didn't see any use all the way down. Nathan had some "prizes" we'd gotten at the dollar store, especially two dinosaurs that he played with for hours. Clara slept most of the time, and when she was awake got a hold of a newspaper Nathan had picked up at a truck stop and tore it to shreds. Levi found a little spitwad she had made when he got her out.

On the drive back, though, the DVD player saved us. Nathan just kept asking for more "dinosaur prizes" and since the dinosaur prizes were all gone, would play with nothing else. He eventually lapsed into despair and at one point started saying "mommy got sick!" over and over, and laughing manically each time. (I did not get sick; I don't know where he got this from. His sense of humor is certainly original, and very boyish.)

And I think that's all that's worth sharing about the road trip portion of our vacation. I figured that we'd let you enjoy our trip like we did, a little at a time. I hope you enjoyed this first installment, and I'll post more later.

August 9

On Monday we celebrated five years of marriage. That's both a long and a short time, depending on how you think about it. To satisfy my idle curiosity, I looked up what each anniversary is supposed to represent. You know, like fifty years is your golden anniversary. Well, gold is a long time coming. One year is paper, two years is cotton, three is leather, four is fruit/flowers, five is wood. (And for my in-laws, who celebrated their fortieth on Sunday, it's rubies.) This list is intriguing to me. Where did it come from? How many lives and experiences and handed-down folklore layered up over the years until it just came to be known that one year is like paper and five years is like wood? I like how the gifts become more substantial each year. I'm just hoping I can hold on until our sixth anniversary, which will be candy/iron. Now that's an interesting proposition for a gift.

My brother did our wedding video, and he did an interview section as part of it. It was done just a few days before our wedding. Every time we watch it, Levi likes to point out how I looked scared out of my mind. Sort of a deer in the headlights, "This thing is forever. Are we sure about this?"

That terrified look is how I deal with change. I worry about change. I worry too much about change. And then the big change is never as big or awful or life-shattering as I fear it might be. I did the same thing before both of my babies were born, too. I did it before I went to college. It's just my coping mechanism, I guess.

And marriage is both more difficult and more easy than I had thought it would be. And it's nice to have someone to face the hard things in life with. Someone who's obligated to listen to everything you have to say. (Except when I'm reading a book. I'm not to blame for my deafness when I'm reading a book.) It's even nicer to have someone you can share a comfortable silence with.

A while ago I found this editorial in the Boston Globe. It's a beautiful conversation about the shared language you develop in a marriage. The experiences that bind you together and the words you choose to define and remember the experience. We have those words, those inside jokes and phrases, together. And I'm sure you do. If not with a spouse, then with a family member or a friend. It's one of those intangible markers of a good relationship: being able to make the other person laugh without anyone else understanding.

And so, husband, after five years, after all the good and the bad, the happy and the sad, I'm glad I chose you. I'm glad we have built this life, with our cozy house and our beautiful babies, together.