Tracks to Clementine

Ages

Yellow Dog and I went camping this past weekend and it was glorious.

Glorious, in this case, also means it was really cold outside and I caught a cold by the time we hit George. But! It also means that having a trifold bed inside the tent makes a lovely little nest and that the tacos are still delicious at Tacos El Rey. (This restaurant did not exist when I lived in the Desert Oasis, but was first a taco truck, then a tiny little walk-up, and now a small restaurant. And so fucking good that you want to eat tacos for every meal.)

We camped in a spot that I'd not been since about 5th grade, right in the middle of all of the coulees and very Time Has Had Its Way With the Wooly Mammoth. We sat and looked at things and stuff and drove around and looked at things and stuff and were generally quite content, particularly if one counts the six toasted marshmallows I consumed on Saturday night.

Not so good is that when I was showing Yellow Dog around the Family Farm we noticed that Uncle Church had torn out my grandmother's entire orchard and garden as well as the peonies and yellow roses in the back yard. True, my grandparents are both dead and my uncle's family now lives in their little house because they had to sell their huge house due to farming difficulties, but those roses were transported by my grandfather all the way from Vernal, Utah in 1980 from an alkalai bed that had been abandoned forty years earlier, a rosebed near their old home where their oldest son had died of lukemia. A rosebed that appeared dead, but in the most The Secret Garden sort of way still managed to flourish when brought to an entirely different desert. And the orchard, though it produced wormy apples and sour plums, was tended every year by my aging grandmother, including the year she died. (Okay, okay, I'm exaggerating: they were only tended by her up until the year before she died.)

Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure the orchard was gone when I was there two years ago, but the desolation of it didn't really hit me in the same way because I wasn't really looking for history that time. It all amounts to this: there are no visible stories there anymore. At least, not my stories. My father's house was sold to people I've never met and my grandparent's house is occupied by people who are related to me through blood only. When walking through the newly growing fields I still remember all the things I did and said and what I thought about them when I did and said them, but it makes me sad that I can't show anyone the markers of those days. I didn't feel this way about moving out of the space on 4th or when Gilded Lily was torn down, but I wanted those yellow roses to be there to show my children--or at least my boyfriend--and now there's just grass and gravel. Oh, and a few new trailers in the yard of Uncle Narcolepsy. Those may just stick around until the next ice age. Especially now that several of them have tires weighing down the windtorn rooftops.

In conclusion: eat at Tacos el Rey.

Posted by Ida at April 11, 2005 05:10 PM