Back to posting to this blog after our vacation to Santa Fe. Had a great time on very familiar ground.

Familiarity is one reason I go. As everything changes, we search for that which seems not to: old songs, old cars, old friends. I live two thousand miles from where I grew up. I go back to see if things have changed and of course they have.

But Santa Fe almost hasn’t. We were there for a fiesta that has been celebrated on the plaza for 299 years – since 1712! The plaza, the Governor’s Palace and the Plaza Hotel are the same. The tile on the hotel floor has the same luster it did in my childhood. The five and dime is half a block away – though it’s no longer Woolworth’s.

I visited Cow Creek, twelve miles of dirt roads beyond of Pecos NM, where a spent several summers with my boyhood friend George. The river is the same as are the road and the rocks. The trees – many scorched by a fire several years ago – are returning. It all lifts my heart.

And so does this children’s story I’m writing.  Twenty-thousand words so far.  I hope to finish it by Fiesta Santa Fe’s three-hundredth birthday, next fall.