Queerly Beloved

This week we went down to Santa Fe for a memorial for my grandparents.

My grandmother passed away just after Christmas last year (just shy of 97 years old!) My grandfather passed away 12 years earlier. They wanted their ashes interred together (along with one of their most beloved dogs, Tootsie, ha), so this was the memorial for both of them. My grandfather was a veteran, so they will be interred at the military cemetery in Santa Fe.

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I took Sunday off of work, as initially I thought we might be leaving then, but it turned out we weren't going to leave until Monday. It was nice to have a day beforehand. Alex, Bella, and I went on a walk, and I packed.

We headed over to my mom's in the mid-afternoon, me to stay the night for ease of travel the next day, and Alex to get a tutorial on the specifics of catsitting Jaspurr.

Alex was really not feeling well, and had been sick since the middle of the previous week (to add to what a terrible week that already was.) I luckily didn't get the full illness experience that he did, though I was very badly congested for about a week.

When we got to her house, my mom answered the door with a big bandage on one of her fingers. She told me that she'd spent a chunk of the afternoon at urgent care, because while she was trying to get some gardening done she cut a chunk out of one of her fingers. Apparently that was how the nurse described it at urgent care: missing a chunk. She'd been unable to stop the bleeding for more than two hours, so finally went to urgent care. :| They did finally got it stopped there, but apparently it took multiple applications of their quick-clotting agent (which evidently hurt like a motherfucker), and said there wasn't really anything left to be stitched, because it was, as mentioned, a missing chunk. Yikes. And much like when she fell: you couldn't tell me about it!?

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Monday we left a little later than we'd hoped to, just before 10:00. We decided to take 285 for most of the way rather than our usual I-25 route. I-25 just isn't that pleasant to drive, while 285 goes through some very pretty parts of the mountains, and then takes you straight into Santa Fe.

I didn't really take any pictures on the way down, though I probably should have. It really was a very pretty drive for most of the way.


Picture from my cousin: I never even saw this adorable little bat that was hanging out above her door, but he was still the highlight of the day.

Four more pictures, including a really great sign:

On my mom's window before we left: a freshly molted mayfly.

The drive was pleasant and also pleasantly uneventful. We got to Santa Fe in the late afternoon.

The hotel we stayed at called itself a "Concept Hotel," but as far as I could tell the concept was "what if our hotel was actually a low to mid motel?" The room wasn't great, but it also was by far not the worst place I've stayed.

We had dinner at the attached restaurant, where I had an extremely mid burger. (With extremely lackluster green chile, which is criminal in Santa Fe.) Taylor and my mom both ordered tacos, which were probably even more mid. Like... maybe a 5 or 6 out of 10, but again, that's like a Santa Fe 3.

It was nice to see some family I haven't seen in a long time. My cousin's kids especially. They're both late teens/early 20s, and I haven't seen them since they were like... 4 and 7 or something?

Everyone was really sympathetic about Cy.

There was this absolutely fantastic sign posted at the pool:


Highlighting by me. Surely multiple people looked at this sign before it was completed, right? Infectious decease?? Is that what we're calling zombies, now?

Some of the family was going to hang out by the pool for a bit after dinner, but we were pretty tired, so we just headed back to our room to hang out for a bit before going to bed.


This picture was actually from Tuesday, but I feel like it's better to put it here than with the memorial pictures. The donut in a crystal ball was just very funny to me.

I genuinely do wish I'd had a chance to go around more of Santa Fe to take pictures of all the murals and things we passed. There were a lot of amazing ones, but we just didn't ever really have the time and energy to do much besides the planned structured activities.

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Tuesday was the actual memorial itself. We had a fairly slow morning, which was good, because none of us had slept particularly well. (I also hadn't slept very well or much at all on Sunday night, so I was really feeling it.)

In the early afternoon we carpooled to the cemetery. We had to plan to move pretty quickly, as they only have 20 or 30 minute blocks for everything before they shuffle you out to make way for the next ceremony. Mom, Debby, and Jeff still had to finalize their design for the headstone. They picked the words "Forever Together" and a sandhill crane image.


My grandmother's high school picture, and my grandfather's army portrait.

A gust of wind came through right as the ceremony started and knocked my grandmother's portrait over. Debby laughed afterwards about how she obviously had needed to get the last word in!

Three more memorial pictures:

Portraits, and the containers for their ashes.


The cemetery. Funnily, the family pointed out that their original apartment in Santa Fe is just barely out of sight from here.

After that, we went back to the hotel for a small reception. Just some snack type foods and mingling. Debby read some condolence cards from friends and distant family. Jeff had put together some very thoughtful little cards for everyone, containing a short biography and photo of my grandparents, plus a coin and either a $2 or $5 bill from the year they were born. It was very nice.


The picture included with my card. This is closer to how I remember both of them than their portraits. <3

Nicki, Charles, and their kids went shopping for a while after, but we were again tired, so opted for hotel room and naps.

Later that evening we went out to dinner together (to what Jeff and Kristy kept reminding us was their favorite restaurant, ha.) Very good Mexican food (though the family that owns the restaurant is from El Salvador, we were told.) The food was excellent, and it was nice to chat with everyone a bit more.

Debby is moving almost immediately to Michigan to be near her daughter and her grandkids. I really like my cousin Nicki, and her kids seem to have grown up to be very cool people, and I am a little sad that it might be a very long time before I see them again. I know my mom intends to go visit them all in Michigan, but I don't know when I'll be able to make that trip. Hopefully eventually!

My mom and Jeff really don't get along that well, so I have a feeling we won't be likely to see them again any time soon. My mom even expressed she's not sure she'll see him again ever, which is... a shame to me. Though I also understand.

Bittersweet all around.

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Wednesday was our travel day back.

I actually almost got some sleep, though I did wake up stupid early.

We started our day by getting everything packed up, and then heading to a sourdough bakery that we'd seen advertised in a tourist-y booklet about food and drink options. We were mostly trading off doing dramatic readings of how pretentious a lot of the fine dining sounded, finding the most expensive things on the menus, and comparing how many establishments tried to claim to be the oldest in the city. But then the bakery sounded genuinely really good, haha.

And it was! We had chile cheese croissants for breakfast and they were delicious. I also got a sourdough baguette to take home. It was very tasty. So if you are ever in Santa Fe and want some tasty bread: Wild Leaven Bakery was quite good.

I did try to take at least a few more pictures on the drive this time, though most are of the expected mediocre quality of "cell phone pics snapped out the window of a car moving at highway speeds."


New Mexico really does have some lovely dramatic landscapes.

Eight pictures from the drive back, including the Rio Grande Gorge:

Terribly unattractive background, but the cholla were blooming a really brilliant pink. Of course none of the attempts to take pictures of them in more attractive settings turned out...

Fairly early in the drive, we took a wrong turn (or more accurately, failed to take a right turn) and wound up on the completely wrong road. We didn't notice for quite a while, until we were suddenly approaching Taos, haha. It was a little out of the way, but it was actually a really beautiful drive, and easy enough to get back to the right road.

And the trip back to the correct highway took us over the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge:


It's pretty dramatic!

We did actually stop to take a better look:


That sure is a gorge!



Shortly after that we passed Earthship Biotecture, which was pretty interesting looking from the road, though I failed to get any pictures. I do not disagree with the general ethos behind them - sustainable, off-the-grid housing, that also looks real cool. However, I am also utterly unsurprised that the main page will sell you the Earthship Founder's book "A Coming of Wizards: A Manual of Human Potential" lol. Now available on kindle!

Luckily we rejoined our correct route juuuuust before the major road work that had taken the highway down to a single lane. I do so love waiting for a good twenty minutes for it to be our turn to follow the pilot car...


Got to sit next to this building where we were waiting, though.

Then, once we were past that, there was another section down to one lane. Tragic. (There'd only been one stretch on the way down!)


But this time there were road goats! They were hanging out between the road and the fence, though they then moseyed slowly to the other side of the fence. I'm fairly sure I saw this same herd on the other side of the road, also right on the shoulder, on the way down.

Finally we were back in Colorado! The San Luis Valley is very pretty. I'd like to actually visit Monte Vista for the crane migration someday.


A single pronghorn.


Yaks!

And that's it.

It was a bittersweet reason to take the trip, but it was also nice to be somewhere else for a few days.