Go West

“Take me to Texas
Two hundred years ago
Where a pride rose from the ashes of San Jacinto
It still beats in every heart
Like a battle cry
Where I was born, where I was raised, so when I die

Take me to Texas, on the open range
The Rio Grande is in my veins
It’s heaven there and so my prayer
Is that you’ll take me anywhere in Texas
The only home I know
I’m a child of the Alamo and the Yellow Rose
So when I go, take me to Texas. -George Straight

My grandparents have been gone for quite a few years now. After my grandmother lost her battle to cancer, my grandad lived every day after she was gone just waiting to go meet up with her again…and he soon did… 9 months to the day, actually…medically, there was no reason why he died…but we all knew that that old bear wouldn’t want to be left behind for too long…he would go meet his bride on his terms…and so within one year, those two love birds were gone from us. I missed them then, but I miss them now in a different way.

When I was around 13 or so…I remember sitting with my grandmother on this puffy floral couch in the sitting room of my childhood home and being so genuinely interested in her life story…for the first time I was really listening to her… and I remember feeling so baffled that all that time, I had never really bothered to know her fully…I remember the years of aging just falling off of her face as she spoke…the more details she gave, the younger she became to me and I became so intrigued getting to know this girl behind the pearly white hair and wrinkled hands…my grandmother was always one tough cookie to me, but that day I saw it wasn’t just the raising of 4 boys in the middle of nowhere west Texas that got her this way…she had been an overcomer always…as she described the pain from losing her own mother at such a young age, my name sake, Allie Rae, even she became this real person to me for the first time and my grandmothers grief, I realized, had never changed…that young girl who had lost her mom was talking to me from behind those ridiculously blue eyes and I remember, I was entranced. Grandmother would go on to tell me about her love for her brothers…how special her brother Garland truly was and the things he did to protect her…she would tell me about the change in her fathers behavior and how fast he got remarried after losing Allie…how her new stepmother could have been the inspiration for the one in the Cinderella story and all the drama that came thereafter…and in a romantic twist that I had no idea was coming, she would detail the beginning of her love story with my grandad…when they ran away together and woke up a preacher in the middle of the night to officiate their spontaneous wedding. How much she loved him…how much he loved her. I just want to hear more stories from her and watch them play out on my granddads face…he was a man with few words but his facial expressions said everything and I always wondered if he saved his words for her…his safe place…because his expression of love drastically changed when she got sick the last time…he became the voice for them, he gave the smiles and hugs for them, he showed up for them, he came out of his shell, finally, for her.

Growing up, my grandparents took me on some good ole’ west Texas road trips. My memory bank is filled with bits and pieces of white sandy hills, a loud hollering uncle in a big red suburban, giggling cousins, women in bonnets handing out homemade cookies, and almost meeting my maker sinking low into the dark abyss of a very deep dark pool…I remember messy peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and pressing my forehead to the car window searching for the Indians, with their bows and arrows, hiding somewhere behind the green brush across the mountain ranges after asking for the umpteenth time “are we there yet”…grandads genius answer to my backseat impatience  “can you see any of those hiding Indians Allie Rae? If you look real close, you can probably spot their feathers but they move real fast so pay attention!”

I longed for those fragments of time again, I longed for one more day with Robert and Joretta…I wished my kids could have really known them…so in my own way, I took my family to “meet” my grandparents…we just needed a map and a cooler filled with P&J’s…and the rest would take care of itself.

Big Bend, Marfa, Alpine…all those places were our destinations for our family spring break trip, however, the vacation could have ended right when we arrived to that amazing convent looking rental house on the outskirts of Mtown and it still would have been one of my very favorite trips I had ever been on with my little family. We stopped at all the spots that my grandparents had once taken me to as a child…we just went on this homage type of a road trip without any expectation and it was just what my heart had needed…what we all needed oddly enough and as I tried to take each moment in…all I could think to myself was that this had to be my very favorite day in all my life since becoming a mom…every moment of that road trip will live forever in my heart, right next to the bits and pieces of my original voyage.

My granddad always smelled of cigars and my grandmother, like a good pink lather of Merle Norman cream… and I miss them. What treasures they were, what treasured memories they left me, and how much more I would treasure them now…