No doubt, mourning Annie contributes ...

It occurred to me that part of my emotional instability this weekend - I felt weepy - was not mere homesickness, or rue at my parents' aging, but a little bit of grief for a fallen hero. In any event, below is something I penned on my flight back home, tonight. Miss you, Ann! Thanks for rocking my world when I was a teenaged girl who needed a badass Texas woman to admire. You done good!
Okay, so I'm homesick. What can I say? Here I am 35,000 feet above Missouri or Kentucky maybe, about another 90 to 120 minutes left to go to the east coast and I've just finished browsing this month's copy of Texas Monthly. (I always try to snap a copy when I leave the Great State.) On my i-Pod shuffle, a rare three or four songs by Robert Earl Keen out of the past 5 or 6. One about an illegal immigrant, which I think I had heretofore not known. Robert Earl Keen always makes me miss West Texas. Couple that with the brief article on stargazing in the middle of nowhere where I used to live, and Keen's "Hard Amarillo Highway" (apparently covered by REK) and I sincerely miss West Texas. As my immediate family has moved to the eastern half of the state - as has most of my extended family - I no longer have a "reason" to visit, but I feel a pressing need. I feel the need to to gaze into those inky night skies, to experience the utter dryness again. It's been nearly a decade since I've experienced a dry summer, and a baker's dozen since I've known bone-dry, parched weather. I so long for that isolation right now - the isolation that maddened me as a teenager. It's funny how sometimes you need a million people crushing you and other times you need a million miles to breathe.

This past trip, too, however has made me glad to be where I am at the moment. Though I wish I were geographically closer to my and my hubby's extended family right now, I also really - today - appreciate where I am at the moment. I guess it helps to know we don't want to be here forever. But it also helps to know if we are, the world won't end. Maybe I'm finally heeding my own (self-enforced) prayer: "God, thank you for who I am, when I am, where I am ..." I suspect it's always good to be grateful for the present, becausee that's where we live, but it also helps to assuage anxiety over the future in the long run. Not to mention each day is a day closer to another where I am supposed to be and a nother day when I'll have the opportunity to do good. Each day is a constant becoming.

I seriously miss Texas, but it will always be my home and where my bones and dust will return. I have today - that's all I have - and each today is another opportunity to love and to achieve.

Wow, the thin air up here is awesome!