Day 1

We pick our way over the rubble. Delicately, one foot gingerly placed before the next. Everything is the same dusty brown, if you don’t know how to look at it. But with each carefully crafted footfall, wending our way along the skirt of the mountain, we begin to notice the hundreds of shades, rocks crumbling red, bits of golden-silver mica reflecting back up at the sun, shale, side-ways, jutting out, revealing its undulating gray waves of sedimentary wisdom.  The saguaros dapple a landscape that on the contrary to being barren, seems to be ripe with little signs of life. Hidden life. Secret life. I hold my breath and then laugh in surprise as a quail, with its oddly shaped headdress darts alongside, back and forth, in the dry riverbed to our left.  You stop with a crunch and take my hand in yours. We are still. The sun is bright but the air is cool, not the unrelenting sauna of summer. I close my eyes and the warmth prickles my eyelids. Your lips gently rest on each lid, one at a time, and invite me to look back up into your face, your dark eyes and hair mixing with mine, melting together, cutting back swaths of time, as if we were suddenly children, not vaguely middle-aged parents.

“I’ve forgotten,” I say. Tears of some undefined emotion well up and catch me off guard.

“We all forget, sometimes,” you reply, and we continue walking, in silence.