My antepenultimate move was from Guatemala City to El Paso...bought a nice little house that was being remodeled top to bottom by a couple of investors...looks and feels like new but without the new price tag. Moving is a beating. I've done it several times, 9 moves involving 4 countries since the spousal unit and I have been wed (Wed? Wedded? Whatever...), if I'm counting correctly, and I don't plan on doing it again. Well...maybe one more time...
There's this special spot on Highway 118 a few miles west of Fort Davis, where the highway begins a curve around one of the gentle Davis Mountains, and there's sort of a place to pull off the road, not much more than a wide spot. From there the land slopes downward, mostly south and a little east, and in the springtime you can watch the wind dancing in the green grass that stretches out in front of you. It's a quiet place there, just the occasional cry of a red-tailed hawk circling in the updrafts, searching for a meal down below. Hardly any traffic at all, no big rigs roaring by, it's a peaceful place where you can stand and look backwards in time, to when the world wasn't so noisey and busy and over-run with humans. There's always a breeze there, sometimes enough to snatch your hat off, but always fresh and clean, and even in the summer, cool. That's the place, right there.
I don't know when it'll be, and I don't know exactly how I'll get there, but that will be my penultimate move, when someone who feels the same way I do about the words I'm writing and understands them, when that someone takes that box of ashes out of the car and after a few moments of reflection casts them up, into the air that will carry what's left of me to the place my heart aches to be every day of my life.