what it was like in texas

i'm curious to begin typing this blog post because i'm not sure yet what i'm going to say. for starters hi :-)

i've been experiencing some very interesting circularities and roundabout ways of things happening these last few months. like things are repeating, are recurrent but ultimately find their way to feeling distinctly lighter, truer, and perhaps more hopeful each time. 

for example, i find myself once again entering a period in which i'll be spending a night or two a week away from my burlington apartment. (i started to type "away from home", but that's not entirely true!?). the principle reason for this is that my work schedule has flipped again, requiring my presence in waitsfield for four days a week instead of the lovely and spacious winter's two, so i am staying in the farmhouse here tonight for the first time since last october. i'm staying in a different room than i used to stay in last year, a more temporary guest room of sorts with a mattress on the floor of what otherwise feels like a living room, but it's surprisingly cosy in here. i took a lamp from one side of the room, set it on the floor by this funny bed and plugged it in towards my feet. i can hear the spring peepers outside in the pond, and the rain.

i'm realizing that i often feel most like blogging when i'm (perhaps, probably, etc) experiencing a bout of loneliness. usually on quieter evenings. but unlike my decisively lonely times in craftsbury – it's a little over two years ago since i first lived there – and unlike the weird times in that strange airbnb-esque house where i spent a few nights a week last winter, and unlike the haphazard farmhouse happenings of last summer, this loneliness tonight feels more like a peaceful seclusion. a desirable sort of pause from the busy flow and back-and-forth, out-the-door, on-the-road-ness of how time sometimes feels in burlington. ("the big city" as some would call it.) i spent a few hours after work in a friend's kitchen learning to make falafal, returned to the farm kitchen to warm up my own dinner, and i spent less than five minutes in my car round trip!!!

ok, but the idea behind starting this blog post was to share some drawings and recollections from a trip i took to texas the day after my birthday, to visit my sister and parents. it was my third time ever being in texas. some may recall the epic train-based westward journeyings of two friends some two octobers (novembers?) ago, and years before that, the ten-hour cross-state drive in the opposite direction, from el paso to louisiana. because it was my third time there, directionally speaking i was due for another zig zag back across the state, and indeed this was just what took place. i visited with tess in austin, and then we joined our parents and went all the way to the other side of texas to big bend national park, where there are mountains and somehow both droughts and floods, and then we returned to austin, where i stayed with tess an extra few days, which was a really special time. 

many mysteries transpired during this time of a week or so. i didn't journal much because we were just all over the place, but i had fun drawing things in a little notebook while we were in and around big bend. so here are the drawings. if you look at them while sitting in either: the pouring rain or the hot sun at high noon, you will basically know what it felt like in texas, at least what it felt like to me. noticably, these drawings also feature several words, including some lyrics from a song from a singer in a bar where there were also many dogs.