Homesick, Again

In my classes at the University of Iowa, we're at various stages of talking about native peoples of the American Southwest. Well, as some of you may know, I used to live in the Southwest (El Paso, Tucson, Alamogordo). So it's nice to read about the area. It's almost like I'm going back there mentally at a time I'm not able to go back physically.

Anyway, we've been having typical late winter weather here in Iowa, meaning Mother Nature is being fickle - one day giving us sleet, freezing rain, high winds, overcast skies, and the next, teasing us with one day of clear, blue skies and sunshine . . . only to go back to multiple days back-to-back of oppressively gray clouds.

It's days like this, with a lack of sunshine, our natural source of Vitamin D, that I begin to miss the Southwest. I was really homesick earlier this morning, having seated myself at my desk (supposedly to do homework), seeing my framed photo of "UH" (my Uncle Hector from Albuquerque) and Livie in my grandparents' house in El Paso, and another photo of White Sands in southern New Mexico.

I was so homesick, I could close my eyes and almost visualize sitting in my grandparents' home in El Paso, or my own home in Alamogordo, looking at the mountain ranges displaying various shades of copper, reds, oranges, milk chocolate, the sky an intense blue (and at dusk, purples, raspberry pink, blues, black). 

And - eyes closed - I could almost smell the desert - the dryness, the piñon, that distinct wet mineral scent (mixed with creosote and other desert flora) that the land emits after a brief rain.

Opening my eyes, I had an intense feeling of saudade - a Portuguese word, hard to translate - meaning something along the lines of a fondness and longing for something that you know you probably can't reclaim, or some similar such place to which return is unlikely.

While I'm sure I'll be able to visit the Southwest at some point on vacation (which I'm sure I'll greatly appreciate), I'll always feel a tiny bit of saudade because it won't be to my grandparents' home, or the home in which Livie, Andrew, and I lived when we were stationed in Alamogordo.

Anyway, I guess that's enough boo-hooing over my dislike of multiple days of overcast skies. 

So I'll end with a couple photos of my backyard in New Mexico, taken the day we moved in. It had been a bright, sunny day, that day I'd gotten the keys. But within an hour of being at the house, I noticed clouds moving toward us from over the Sacramento Mountains.

The next thing I knew (maybe within 15-20 minutes?), these stormy looking clouds were right over the mountains, and it looked like it was raining hard.

The rains never made it to our backyard. The storm dissipated, clouds dispersing into thin air in that space between the mountains and the backyard.