Epilogue

Cecelia and Darlia had enjoyed our time in Dallas, so we went there first. We spent a few days in Dallas, and then I took my family to see the Alamo in San Antonio, and the site of the Goliad massacre, and the San Jacinto battlefield where Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna. We took a circuitous route back to Albuquerque. I made it a point to pass through Earth and Muleshoe, where we turned north. We crossed the Oklahoma Panhandle into Kansas, and then cut northwest, heading for Colorado Springs. There we visited the Garden of the Gods, and the Air Force Academy.

We spent a couple of weeks in Colorado Springs, Cecelia and Darlia both deciding that they wanted to finish out the vacation there. To the east are the Great Plains, sloping up from the Mississippi River, formerly the home of the horse Indians – the Plains nations, who adopted the horse as their wealth and their transportation and the foundation of their nomadic, hunting life. To the west rose the Rocky Mountains, the spine of the continent, snaking north into Canada and ultimately ending in Alaska, and tracing south through New Mexico into Mexico and, under various names, down into the Andes of South America, where they finally end in Tierra del Fuego. There are higher mountains in the world, but none more magnificent, and Cecelia reveled in their green slopes and cool breezes and the snow that lingered even into summer on the highest peaks.

Finally we drifted south into New Mexico, following I-25 now, for we had to get home and take off almost immediately for our desert place, our second vacation of the year. We make it a point to be there in August, for that was the month when I first took Cecelia to the desert – the month, and the trip, when we conceived Darlia. We haven't missed a year since that first trip, and nothing was going to stop us this year; we were especially determined on that point after the disruption of our Red Hawk vacation.

By the time we came back from Lanfair Valley, and began preparing to go to Leanna – which we'd decided to push back a bit to allow us to recover from so much traveling – we were over the events in Red Hawk. We will never forget that trip, and right now we don't know whether we'll ever go back, because the memories are so sharp. But life is good again, and whenever I look at my family I think of them not as they were during that month of strain, but as they appear in the midday sun of the desert ... or the calm light of afternoon in our own back yard.

January 29, 2006-March 8, 2006