Yesterday my mom and her husband came and picked the kids up and took them up to Virginia City for a company picnic. So I, alone with my camera and water bottle, set off to get some pictures of the highlands, not far from there, where there’s a piece of land for sale.

The parcel sits at the far end of a long, winding road, well after it turns from pavement to dirt and up over the top of its final crest. So far out there, in fact, that you swear you had to have missed it several times before you actually get there. And when you’re close to arriving, you think you surely must have gone too far — until you see the ancient lake bed spread out below you and you know now you’re in the right place. Twelve full acres of rock formation and meadows of pinion pine. Forty-five thousand dollars.

The ride up Geiger Grade is an illusion. It seems as though you wind up and around, back and forth, twisting and turning around the mountain forever, when in reality it’s just a few short miles. I think it feels so far because the road takes you far from Reno and straight into Nevada’s enigmatic interior. A little more than halfway up, you can pull out at Lover’s Rock and climb down off the highway and then up to through the trees and the rocks to overlook the valley.

After the highlands, I wound the rest of the way up to Virginia City. I’d planned to walk the old plank boardwalks through the shops and saloons to get some more shots, but the thunderheads were rolling in so instead I found the picnic and picked up the kids just as the sky opened up. And like a bunch of little giggling, drowned rats we ran through the fields, trying to beat the lightning back to the Jeep.

In a place like Nevada, rain is spiritual. Even if you don’t consider yourself a spiritual person, you can’t not be affected in strange ways by water falling out of the sky and onto thirsty, open desert. This year, the thunderheads have had an awful habit of floating on past Reno before letting go all over the ranges to the east, leaving the city high and dry. So when it started to rain, we chased it.

With all of our windows rolled down on purpose, we drove down into the belly of that storm – and it was a good one – down through Six Mile Canyon until it dumped us out in Dayton, where the rain was so visual, so distinct, falling on farmland and mountains and fields and backroads. We were soaked. The inside of the car was soaked. We plowed through patches of rain fog, surrounded by strike after strike of beautiful, frightening lightning. And winds that were swaying power lines, the kind that would turn umbrellas inside out if anybody in Nevada really ever used one, under an angry sky that growled and spit at us as we drove the remaining 40 miles home, with the radio turned down low so we could hear the sky’s eerie moaning echo across the valley.

Posted by tee in favorites, sense of place
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When I was a little girl, I used to visit my grandparents up in Maine for the summer. My grandmother would stay behind and go to church, or bake, or clean up the house, visit with neighbors, and my grandfather and I would go on nature walks and to museums and libraries and exploring the woods and for long drives and to the beach and collect seashells and save them. And then we’d go off to the movies and walking through town and to the post office and then home to settle in, have dinner, play monopoly and do crossword puzzles and read until I fell asleep.

He was a writer type for sure. He had two best pens. One he’d write articles and letters and books and editorials with in the study. One he’d do crossword puzzles with in his big brown chair by the window. I was always itching to get my hands on those pens. So perfect. I’d never used a pen like those pens, his very best and off limits to a little girl with dirty hands known for losing things.

My grandfather died two and a half years ago on a January evening, 3,000 miles away, before I could tell him how much of an impact he had on me, how much of himself he sent me out into the world with. Before he met my daughter. Before I could say goodbye on my own terms.

His death remains the single hardest thing I’ve ever been through. I still feel like the world lost something irreplaceable when he stopped breathing that night in his chair, reading the newspaper in their hotel room at the beach in South Carolina.

Yesterday I got a small package in the mail from my grandmother, who was ripped in two when he died and never quite made it back into herself again. I didn’t open it until just a few minutes ago. In it were two old, well-worn pens, and a torn brown bag of sandy, salty seashells.

Posted by tee in de la vida
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I guess if I had words for the last 36 hours, I’d use them. Watched fireworks. Had a nice dinner out. Drove around town. Subdued. Peaceful. Today and yesterday. The highlight of both being Shane mooning me in the headlights, and putting my underwear on his head.

Posted by tee in de la vida
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