On Texas, Rain, and My Mother.

I cannot stop writing about Texas, which is to say I cannot stop writing about you. I am not sure when or where along the line the idea of being in Texas became, to me, synonymous with the idea of being in love and being alone. Both times I have been in Texas, I had my heart in my throat, stuck there in the kind of way that can kill a person if you don’t figure out how to get along with it. Where am I going?

I wrote last week, or was it the week before, about the eclipse and my son and the shadows on the ground and baking banana muffins with real sugar, but in the background of all of it was the beating drum, the word in my throat, the thought of it. Texas like a spell. My sister and I once drove clear across the state because a guy in a bar told us there were hills in Marfa where there were nightly alien sightings, where the lights flickered and trembled across the horizon line in impossible patterns. That just watching it would bring you to your knees. So we got in the car, and we drove west across that big openness. So open. So open that at one point as we drove into the sunset, we were convinced we’d died and that we’d driven straight into the afterlife. That’s what that kind of space can do to a person. Confuse you and convince you of your own unmoored mortality.

Last month, we tried to make a baby, and for four days, I was convinced for no reason really that I was pregnant. I even took a photograph of myself in the mirror. Shirtless and in sweatpants with my stomach thin but curved, empty but not knowing it. I was almost embarrassed for the girl in the photograph as I held it in my hand. How hopeful we can be. There is a line from a Tim Harding novel I am trying to think of right now but cannot recall the actual words, only the taste of them in my mouth. That kind of emptiness that can confuse a person too.

I sense myself putting off this baby and also waiting for it in equal measure. I wanted to say, waiting for her. But I won’t pretend to know like I did before. I can feel myself putting it off because it feels so good to own my body, to wear my own jeans, to have angles and elbows, to look like myself even if, at times, I look nothing like what I look like in my head. I catch my reflection and wonder who it is or mistake myself for my mother in the nineties, which is actually more of a compliment than anything. I guess this baby will come whenever it is ready to come, jeans or no jeans. I want the baby more than I want the jeans, there I said it. I hope they hear me.

Speaking of my mother. The only thing I want to write about more than Texas is my mother. When I was young she would go out in the rain and listen to Van Morrison and turn over the soil in her garden. In the good years she was always gardening. Big, huge flower gardens that grew taller than her, you would lose her in them, bent over with a trowel in her hand, turning the dirt, always turning the dirt. The light Minnesota rain making all the greens even greener and there she was, turning the dirt. The same week as the eclipse and as the banana muffins, my son and I built a garden bed and planted ten tomato plants in the rain. The life we build can be a monument in even the smallest of ways.

When I was a child, I would buy disposable cameras at the drugstore because I was so worried about everyone changing. I suppose I’ve always been like this.

Maybe it’s because my favorite photographs of me were taken on that drive across Texas and because I know we will never again be that young, that beautiful, and that free to just drive off into the distance chasing lights.