I’m on the road again. A milestone birthday with family, Nicolas turns ten this week; the two digits, the eternity of his being ten, if not quite, the memories, the memories in the making of the instant, the joy of being together, counting my blessings, there are too many.
Dylan kept trying to light his brother’s candles and failed over and over again, drowned by laughter. We sang in Spanish and in French and last in English so Nicolas got to blow his candles three times, and Dylan got to fail to light them many more, and try again, and the laughter engulfed us all.
We are staying at my sister’s house; my sister is not my sister but she is the only one, bursting with life and she makes me stronger. We are strong women in our own different ways, and family has nothing to do with our bond.
Her house in the plains of east Texas I make my canvas. Mobile homes are all around, pickup trucks, white men revving them up and down the potholed road, next to Latino families, like my sister’s, some circus families, like hers, and there are new developments over on the main Farm to Market road leading up to interstate 30 pushing the real estate prices up. It’s a landscape of desolation for me, and of wonder, in its foreignness. I know I should get to know the people who live here and shape the landscape to better understand how we got to where we are as a nation. It is one more line on the list of things I have to do to not die an idiot, as the French like to say.
My sister makes her brother’s circus suits, when she has time, and she didn’t get to clean the house before we arrived yesterday, so I made this picture.
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