River View
Stood on the banks of the Rio Grande this morning. It is frozen nearly to the middle. The heavy grass crunched beneath my feet. I’m in Alamosa close to the river’s headwaters. It’s a sweet river here. Clean and pure, almost a mountain stream. I could sit beside this river all day. A man could get a lot of thinking done.
We had more music last night at Society Hall in Alamosa. The Red River Songwriters stopped by on their way to various homes back in Texas. The house was full, hearts were full, and the music tied us all together. In a bit we’ll have breakfast then pack up our bags and start our own trip home, with a stop in Roswell, because it’s a long drive back home if we don’t and what really is the hurry?
It’s nice to be in the no hurry portion of my life. I’ve hurried a lot just to get here and now I can stop. Savor the moment. Of course, as I wrote those words I realized the underlying current is that I have the resources to do it, because if I was scratching out a living on a dirt farm, there would never be a no hurry portion of my life. There would just be work from birth to death. But I suppose if you were doing it beside the Rio Grande in the San Juan valley you still might find time to sit beside the river and look at the mountains.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale