Half-forgotten memories.

A photo on my parent's living room shelf caught my attention today. I have actually picked it up on several previous occasions to dust it and move it from one spot to another in attempts to impose order on the menagerie of family and friends caged in metal and wood frames. I think that I had not looked at it though. I don't know why I did today.

The photo is half of a photo, in truth. At one time, years ago, it was a photo of my ex-husband and me, sitting on the side of the road somewhere in Arizon or Nevada. We had on funny winter hats that we had purchased at a Walmart in Roswell, New Mexico, along with cheap sunglasses. January in New Mexico is colder than January in Louisiana, and we had packed without this thought to bother us. Somewhere beneath the hats, our ears were cold and red. The sun is high overhead and out of the picture, casting a beige light on the gray mountains slumping down behind us. A river, the Colorado, I think, is just visible. It's nothing more than the leftover thread from a button-sewing project tossed aside without thought. We were on our way to Vegas. We had just visited the Segura Forest in Tucson. We gaped in awe at the stained red cliffs and the endless forest of giant malachite pin cushions. We both felt as if we had stepped onto Mars or some other strange, distant planet.

He was clipped from the photo long ago, and so I sit there alone on the edge of a road overlooking mountains and a scrapped thread river. I smile and squint my eyes behind dark lenses. I've just left a lonely, distant planet of pincushions. And there are so many more ahead of me.