Hmmm–where was I?

                                   Dog Walking Along the Colorado River

 

I have spent the last couple of months luxuriating in the warmth of friends and family—first in Jackson, then Palisade and Grand Junction, Colorado, and Thanksgiving in El Paso. I was able to experience the gratitude of the season for much longer than one day!

                                   Halloween In Western Colorado

                                   Thanksgiving Turkey Trot in El Paso

 

And then on to Hobbs—taking pictures of the homes, schools, and places where the years that determine who and what really matter in life begin to form.

                                    Just outside of Hobbs–VERY FLAT!

 

It is amazing how environment triggers such strong and specific responses. This was my home until the year I left to marry and have a family. The place that has left indelible imprints on my life: on my ideas of beauty, of what friendship is, or good food, or what the perfect sunset looks like. My first home.

As I drive down streets that I haven’t been on in decades, read their names, I remember that this girl friend lived just up the block or realize that the walk that my sister, Joy, and I took to get to our first school was less than 4 blocks away—a walk that seemed an adventure—our first solo excursions.

Those first years seem idyllic; we lived in employee housing—a Humble Oil Company camp. It had only a half dozen or so homes, a park all to ourselves, a large paved area where we learned to ride bikes and balance on pipe fences, a place that provided a world of imagination. We soon found our way to the library, probably a place in time and space that is my favorite: a stucco, pueblo style building set in the middle of a block of lawn and shade trees. There I was introduced to reading and it was the subject of my very first watercolor painting. Thanks, Mom, for that wonderful gift of, not just the paints, but of seeing in me the desire to express myself.

When the camp closed some of the employees purchased the homes and moved them elsewhere. We ended up on the very edge of town. The house has been changed so much that it is unrecognizable as the one we spent years in.

                                     Part of the fence that Dad built sometime around 1956-1957

But it is still the edge of town and, minus the fence and paved road, looks just as it did when we took off and wandered forever.

 

Eventually the small, two-bedroom, one-bath house was just too small for the six of us. Mom and Dad bought a new home, again on the edge of town—this time to the north. This is where we still lived when I left Hobbs.

 

I have not been overcome so much with nostalgia, as with a sense of belonging. Not that Hobbs is a place where I will eventually live, but this is a sense of where I came from and how that has made me who I am—someone who loves wide horizons!