My mom and I got off the plane in Albuquerque and headed for the white Isuzu Trooper we kept parked at the airport. After our first few visits to New Mexico, when my mom had properly fallen in love with the landscape and started buying property – all sagebrush and pink dirt – she decided we needed our own car there. This one was properly beat up enough to fit in, as I learned after my eyes had adjusted from the bombastic wealth of the Bay Area to this perennially poor state. But the colors! Even on the license plates! The flamboyant yellow, red and turquoise delighted me, set as they were against the glow of the high desert. I suppose we both were in love with this new frontier.
The Isuzu barreled towards the Santa Fe, the scenery opening up as we climbed higher and higher. The pinon trees were larger, the dirt more vibrantly red and the sagebrush placed perfectly in the scene. I saw the signs of poverty, front yards filled with junked out cars and shuttered businesses, but as a sheltered 11-year-old I didn’t have any framework to interpret what it meant. I just stared out the window and waited. The best part was coming.
We pulled up to the Santa Fe plaza as the sky began to darken. Summer in New Mexico means afternoon thunderstorms, fat drops of rain dampening the rusty earth and cooling the stray dogs, thin horses and humans alike. Up the stairs of the Coyote Café we found our Cantina, a simple roof deck café roofed in corrugated tin. It took no effort to settle back into this place. We were almost alone that afternoon, arriving after the lunch rush and before happy hour. I nibbled my quesadilla and drank in my mother’s excitement; she lit up when we were in New Mexico. Everything seemed to enchant her and she bought it all – Zuni pottery and woven baskets, art from small alleyway studios in Taos, parcels of bare mesa land. I knew that she also appreciated the long haired Native American men - young, strong and beautiful.
I rested my elbows on the wide wooden table and chatted on and on about something or other. She was smiling her big toothy smile at me when the sky above opened up and kitten sized raindrops poured from sombrero shaped clouds. Each point of water hit that tin roof like a bongo, tapping and echoing off of the metal. The sound engulfed us, and soon we couldn’t hear one another over the thunderous cacophony, so instead just sat together silently, smiling. We were warm and dry, while above us the cats and dogs did a rain dance to please the gods. Our heartbeats slowed to desert time, and I had her and all of this infinity to myself. I hoped the rain would last forever.