‘The Mighty Rio Grande’: Song #11 from the Boundless soundtrack

What is home? A mighty river runs through my city, reminding me not where I belong, but how I already belong. In BOUNDLESS, my newly published memoir, I step back into the river of life.

Dec 31, 2024

Find your heartline. It isn’t a thing, and it isn’t any one person or place. In BOUNDLESS, my newly published memoir, I learn how to align with the river of life.

A mighty river runs through my city. I think of it as an artery. I’ve come to think of it as my heartline. This river, which I once left behind and to which I returned, is my teacher.

This ever-changing river is muddy in the spring, dry in the summer, golden in autumn and crystal blue in winter. Sometimes it’s full. Sometimes it’s a trickle.

In the U.S., it is called Rio Grande, big river. In Mexico, it is called Rio Bravo (del Norte), which means, among other things, fierce. It’s a river you cannot ignore.

But There is No Place That is Home

At the opening of BOUNDLESS, my newly published memoir, I don’t know what home will be when the twins leave for college. It’s just us three here—me as a single mother and the twins. Two-thirds of my family will leave at once.

Taking a stab at a new future, I take a print media position 2,200 miles away in Saratoga Springs, New York, that will at last allow me to break the glass ceiling into executive news management. Three weeks in, it’s a catastrophe. A golden opportunity shattered right before my eyes.

So, you’d think the answer would be: Just go home.

The Most-Emptied Empty Nest in America

But home isn’t home anymore. It’s a house that’s empty. I laugh that it was the most-emptied empty nest in America. By the time I return to Albuquerque, having considered anywhere-but-Albuquerque, I resign myself to defaulting to what I know.

But I go three weeks without all my furniture and belongings (including a car, including a coffeemaker, including a bed—name your personal mortifcation there). I am in a house that holds a total of five objects: my tear-drenched self, my fluffy white dog, my MFA in Writing diploma, a leaky air mattress and a set of brown leather barstools that had insisted on staying with the house with the “you know I’m right about this” attitude of a “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” designer.

Everything else, anything useful, anything to remind me I’m competent or I exist—not here. Any object of my desire is in moving van limbo. I may or may not see it again. I’ve enrolled in a curriculum about whether I ever needed the object in the first place.

With so many loose objects of my past spinning in a dark orbit around me, it became clear I was not my things. I was not this empty house.

All My Seasons

What was home then? Was it a place? Or was it something I carried around with me, no matter the place or season.

Sometimes, in my sacred yoga class, they play this song, “The Mighty Rio Grande,” by This Will Destroy You. As I hold down-faced dog, I breathe and think of all the times I’ve seen the full moon rise over the Sandia Mountains on a summer night or the snow geese cawing over the bare cottonwood trees through a desolate winter day with dwindling light.

I think of all my seasons here, living along the mighty Rio Grande. I think about how I have always created home, no matter where I am.

In BOUNDLESS, I only have to remember that to remember how to begin again.

What season are you in? Tell me more in the comments. I want to hear your story.

Woven through BOUNDLESS is the unfolding of the seasons and my attempts to listen more closely.

Early on, as the twins are having their senior photos taken, I hear the intermittent cawing of arriving snow geese, gathering amid the coppery leaves of a wintry bosque along the Rio Grande, and I edge closer to their cries. They are arriving at their winter home. As the camera shutter whirs, the photographer asks the twins, “Where will you go?”

They are getting this question every day. I’m realizing I need to start asking it, too.

Winter begins my season of listening to what will come next, as the twins leave home and I chart my new path.

EXCERPT from BOUNDLESS
I edged closer to listen to the clamor. In their disharmony, I heard a refrain that told me I stood between the end of something and the beginning of another thing. It was winter, a season of listening.

Then just like that, it is spring. The snow geese prepare to embark on their raucous departure home to that Arctic north, right as the twins are sorting through the tumult of college decision season. I call spring a season of “fertile confusion.” By summer, I’m listening faster because I’ve moved to a northern latitude where that season will be here and gone in 13 weeks. That season is the season of “bright torches.” Come fall, the twins have left for college, and I live alone now. The scent of roasted green chile fills the air. The bosque along the Rio Grande comes alive again as the snow geese return, calling “home” to each other. Autumn becomes the season of “radiant invitations.”