To Travel Hopefully

To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.  ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I have a treasure of a friend who is a gifted artist and lives in Albuquerque. Sometime this past winter, we were talking about her art studio (formerly the garage attached to her stucco home) and her wish to get it organized and remodeled. Then she began describing her dream bookcase to hold some hundreds of her books…

Somehow this evolved into Phillip agreeing to build the bookcase and drive it down to New Mexico in our faithful pick-up, with yours truly riding shotgun.

The ride was about 19 hours, through bits of Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. These are not my favorite states. Been there; done that; unimpressed. But either we took a different route, or my perceptions are more generous than they were, or maybe, with age, I’m regressing to childlike wonder once more. Anyway, a lot of views struck me as gorgeous.

“Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels,” wrote Nikos Kazantzakis; maybe my anticipation of seeing my friend and helping her create a new space made the journey lovelier. Of course, getting away with Phillip has always been fun, but this seemed an especially happy vacation.

We cleared space, moved books, and helped get the bookcase up the first day. Phillip had honored our friend’s love for steampunk design when he created the bookcase, and also made her some lights/bookends for a belated birthday gift.

The next day, she and I dusted piles and stacks and other redundancies of books and filled the shelves while Phillip built a wall and dry-walled a new storage closet. We found a neat old door at the local ReStore and my friend and Phillip created the handle to her liking.

We also got walls painted, her flat file recovered and trimmed, and then tackled the fireplace: paint, tile, and a new mantle.

You’ll note how I keep writing “we,” but you probably can guess that Phillip and my friend did most of the work. I swept, washed, had frequent conversations with Griffin (my friend’s amazing dog), made irritating lists of things to do, took photos, and rode (shotgun) to the local home store every day.

Late every afternoon, we showered, dressed, and hit the town for great restaurants and lots of laughter.

We took time off to tour Albuquerque’s Old Town, the Rio Grande Nature Center, several antique stores, and lots of different neighborhoods.

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I’m a northern girl at heart and have not enjoyed the Southwest heat on previous trips, but this time the heat felt great on my sore muscles and joints, so no complaints. At all. The evenings grew cooler and the mornings held the chilled air just long enough for me to take long walks before we started the new day’s activities. It was a lot of fun to study the Southwest plants and landscaping as I explored the neighborhoods, and watch roadrunners skitter through yards.

On our last morning, our friend’s mother, children, and grandchild came to have a look before we all went out for brunch. (I have to say the best thing about this was getting to hold her grandson. What a love!) They praised the space and were as happy as we were with the results of the week’s work. Friends joined us that night and, since they had helped create the studio from a garage, were also pleased to see it reach the stage where the artist can now create.

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We traveled hopefully home in time to see the last of the wild roses on the trail and in the little garden where we trained one over the trellis.

The irises had peaked and have been cut back for another year.

The gardens seem to be taking a breath before the next explosion of color, so we’ve been enjoying our walks, celebrating my birthday, welcoming visitors, and looking forward to the Full Strawberry Moon on the night of the Summer Solstice.

It’s good to be gone; it’s good to be home at Full Moon Cottage. We’re always traveling, never really arriving. Traveling hopefully, though, is a choice, like traveling wisely, peacefully, and joyfully…  I’m grateful for a partner and friends who make such choices easy and challenge me to pay attention to the journey.

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