Tucson thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving morning, after some trouble with the rental car company that I won't get into here, I was on I-8 East to Tucson. It was a bright sunny day- like every day in Yuma- and the air was cool and out on the shiny open road I was in a state of unexpected exhilaration. I think I'd marry Pat Green if he wasn't already married, which I'm nearly certain he is, and I could get him to leave Texas, which is highly unlikely judging from how much he sings about that vast expanse of cowboy land. Anyway. His music makes me inexplicably happy, and I was belting out "three days" and I even smiled at the Border Patrol agent, yes sir I am an American citizen and I will drive safe, thanks, roll down the window and turn up the music and off into the rocky bare mountains that hem in Yuma on the eastern side. Off to Tucson, you don't need that whiskey no more Pat and thank God I'm alive and whoops I left my cell phone on my kitchen table and it's too late to go back and get it now!
Off to the homey house just west of the soft pink Veteran's hospital where I will be greeted by the people who knew me as a baby and their ridiculously friendly and impossibly endearing dogs who are only spoken to in Spanish, the formal tense, where I will be loved and fed well and treated as a daughter. Then to spend Thanksgiving drugged with turkey and pie and red wine and curled in a hammock overlooking Tucson's sparking lights on the back porch of the house with dog footprints in the living room tiles, laughing as the Thanksgiving guests make up strange dances to Barbara Streissand in the light of the chiminea. To my dear friend Roseanne, the best conversations you ever had over omelets, we'll stop eating so many eggs tomorrow, really. Drive up to Mount Lemon, desert to sky forest and breathtaking mountain views in 30 minutes, Laura I know it's amazing but please look at the road. Wandering around the historic neighborhoods south of the University, adobe houses painted bright colors, porches festooned with wind chimes and Mexican tiled windowframes.
I fall more in love with this city every time I come. Of course, the life I envision for myself there will be good and frustrating and excruciating and beautiful in ways that I cannot predict. But I'm looking forward to it. To the life God is preparing for me there already.