Love is a River

Going With the Flow in Taos, New Mexico

Growing up, I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be a rock star’s girlfriend. If I could meet the girl I was then, at seventeen, I’d want to ask her, “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you want more?” But like anyone else, I had my fragile dreams.

In high school, I hid in the library, cutting classes, avoiding the terror of social interactions. I didn’t understand how to connect with people. I was afraid to speak. While waiting for my real life to start, I read.

I read all the time and wrote endless letters, dozens of pages stuffed in fat envelopes, to my long-distance best friend Kim. I didn’t know those were things writers did. I didn’t know I was already becoming a writer.

We’ve been in Taos, New Mexico for a couple of weeks now. Our trailer is parked at my brother’s house, an off-grid adobe with endless views of mountains, mesa and sky. Eric and I are having a break from R.V. life. We’re using a big kitchen. A real bathroom. A washing machine. We’ve even been apart, in separate rooms, for hours at a time.

I haven’t slept much. What happened is, since arriving here, I had an essay published in the New York Times Modern Love column and it turned my simple life upside down.

The day my story was published, I woke up at 3 am, too excited. I checked my email and was surprised to see I had a message from a reader in Switzerland and another from Istanbul. A third reader’s message popped up, then another.

Two weeks later, I am still working my way through hundreds of emails. Many are from bereaved parents, many are from grieving people who found a common experience in my words. I am honored to receive these tender messages, with their stories of irreplaceable losses, of sorrow and the ways we find to carry it.

Storm west of Taos

I read an early version of the essay to my memoir-writing class on Zoom, and one of the other writers suggested it would be a good fit for Modern Love. I never would have seen the possibility myself.

Seven years ago, when I joined the writing group and found out we’d be reading our work aloud, I was scared. I read my pages in a shaky voice, hands sweating, heart racing. It was a supportive group, but the positive feedback was embarrassing. Still, I didn’t think of myself as a writer, so I had nothing to lose. I later discovered, “nothing to lose” is a great place to start.

I decided to submit my essay to the Times, mainly because writing credentials don’t matter for the Modern Love column. In the past, the prospect of writing an author bio thwarted me, because there was nothing to say. Honestly, my main literary accomplishment is this: writer, illustrator, co-editor, and co-publisher of "Today Magazine" circa early/mid 1970s.

That’s the magazine my friend Kim and I made as kids, sitting at the round table in the playroom of my suburban Long Island home, with big sheets of white drawing paper and Magic Markers. It featured interviews with fake celebrities, fashion layouts, news about fictional crimes, bizarre health conditions, terrible beauty advice.

Kim and I revolutionized personality journalism before “People” magazine was even invented, working at that table for hours and hours, days in a row. Our circulation was limited to our parents. The magazine was awesome. It’s where I refined my craft.

I wake this morning in my brother’s house, just as the bedroom fills with the bright orange of sunrise, filtering through new spring leaves. The dream I’d been having fades and life, this life, right now, floods through me, bringing a rushing river of memories.

This life hurts. Now that I know grief. Now that I know things don’t last forever. People don’t stay the same, or they don’t stay at all. Some dreams come true, but not in the way you’d expect. Other dreams never come true. Momentarily, the weight of memories threatens to drown me in this instant of golden sunlight.

A memory snags. Keek at seventeen; one of those trips she and I took to New Mexico, one of those days (there were lots) we would later refer to as “the best day ever.” A snowstorm, a cancelled flight, an extra day in Santa Fe on our way from Taos to the airport. We found a great bead store and spent an hour there, each holding our little trays to collect the beads we chose. We bought seed beads, small vials in all the good colors. Later we went to our room at the Santa Fe Motel and Inn and had Thai takeout and put on some terrible but great Lifetime show. Later we thawed a box of frozen strawberries in the bathroom sink and ate them with most of a whole angel food cake. Keek spread the vials of beads out on the bed in rainbow order and we admired the colors. They were so gorgeous. We talked about what we were going to do with them when we got home.

That was the year when we were making beaded deer skulls. We learned how to do it together, cleaning and boiling the skulls, coating them with beeswax, pushing the tiny beads in, one at a time, with a special tool. She was better at it than I was, her fingers more dextrous, the designs evolving as she worked. We always had an art thing we were working on together, we always had some creative project to talk about.

Kiki's beaded deer skulls

Lying in bed, in the sunshine, for a minute I’m scared. I can’t hold it all. The feelings, the past, the passage of time. Memories of my daughter and what has been lost. The things I did with her, that I’ll never do again. But then, something shifts and I only feel love; its power, how it connects everything.

When I first came to Taos, to visit my brother, I was nineteen and on a road trip from New York to California with my mother. We crossed the Oklahoma border into New Mexico on a hot June day, on one of those two-lane highways that cuts a straight line through the desert. We saw the horizon with clouds stacked one above the other against the brilliant blue sky like a Georgia O’Keefe painting and we said we’re in that painting, right now, and we’ll never forget this.

I couldn’t know, at nineteen, that I’d come back to Taos in my twenties with Eric. Or that we’d return here with our baby Kiki, and then be back with her as a toddler when we were crossing the country on our first R.V. trip together.

I didn’t know my mother would spend her last years in Taos, or that we’d have a family reunion here with her, the one and only time that group of us would ever be together. I can still see a glimpse of that day: teenaged Kiki, and her cousin Sahara from Los Angeles, walking together down a cottonwood-lined dirt road, laughing and beautiful in the Taos golden hour.

I couldn’t know, on my first visit, that Eric and I would one day come to Taos, broken and raw, five months after Kiki’s death, for a grief retreat at Golden Willow. Or that I’d be here now, a year later, with my daughter’s ashes, and I’d stand on a bridge with my brother and sprinkle a pinch of her fairy dust into the wind above a green rushing river.

Golden Hour over Taos Mountain

Maybe a moment like this morning, in the orange rays of dawn, is a gift that only comes with age. Seeing it all, one majestic sweep: the years and their milestones, birth and death, joy and grief, and how it’s all connected by love.

These past two weeks I’ve thought of little other than my Modern Love essay, my new Substack subscribers, my position on Google, the attention on Facebook, and the pressure to write the next post for my newsletter.

I thought having my story in the New York Times was the biggest thing that could happen to me.

But it’s not. Maybe there’s no one biggest thing. Maybe the meaning of a life, one human life, is not in the peaks of accomplishment but in the whole of it.

Today I feel lucky be this age, to have experienced enough joys and sorrows to fill a river. To learn that, when everything swirls together in memory, the regrets and hurt can fall away, and it turns out love is what is left to hold on to.

Looking South, toward the setting moon

What’s Next?

After six weeks in New Mexico, we’re heading North. First stop after Taos is the UFO Watchtower in Hooper, Colorado, where we’ll be staying overnight. Hopefully we’ll see some strange lights in the sky. If you don’t hear from me again, I’m aboard an alien craft.

And… A Very Subjective Survey Of Tacos in New Mexico:

Leo's Far Out Taco Truck, Las Cruces: 5 Stars. Tasty variety of fillings and sauces, eaten at a great Harvest Host overnight stop at Rio Grande Winery, with a view of the Organ Mountains at sunset

Los Cerritos, Roswell: 4 Stars. 89 cents each. Takeout. Eric loved them. I was suspicious because they were so cheap, and didn’t try any. Obviously I missed out.

El Toro Bravo, Roswell: 3 Stars. Eric says too bland. I had enchiladas and got food poisoning, so I’m not voting.

Toribio’s, Taos: 5 Stars. Local fave, hole-in-the-wall. We went back three times so that tells you everything. Omg the green chili, it’s lime-y

Orlando's, Taos: 4 Stars. Overall, reliably excellent.

Ricky’s, Taos: 5 Stars. Very local. Eric’s fave for tacos. Great service. Freshly-fried sopapillias for dessert

Links:

Golden Willow Retreat: a non-profit dedicated to promoting healthy grieving by empowering people impacted by all forms of loss

Modern Love: "We Didn't Know it Was the Last Time" New York Times column 5/5/24