I Remember Now

We are back in Wyoming, for a too-limited time, but back, nevertheless. The air is as fresh and eminently breathable as I recall, and the spaces are as vast and freeing. Through the restricted miracle of a laptop computer—recharged by batteries powered by solar cells—I am able to blog, though due to the remoteness of our location, I will not be able to post my rantings until we've returned to the Internet-connected world at large, about a week from the time I write this.

On the last portion of our travels, which brought us to the sanctity of our home away from home (and away from pretty much everything else), we were conveyed by a neighboring rancher's Range Rover. This generosity saved us a lengthy hike, which we made a few days later just for fun (and it is all the more fun when you are not weighted down with the gear required for a week in isolation).

During the unexpectedly quick, final part of our journey, I overheard the rancher's wife telling the story of some native Wyoming son, away during the Vietnam War, and how his parents sent him a package to ease his homesickness. The scent of sagebrush, crushed under the wheels of the Range Rover, reminded her of this, as it was sagebrush that the soldier received.

And I inhaled to the point of inebriation the scent as I listened to the tale. I remembered collecting snips of sagebrush myself, when we moved from Wyoming to that other place, and I remembered my parents bringing it back to me in subsequent years, when they traveled to Wyoming but I could not.

I expect it's not something most people would find soothing, but I knew how it must have made that soldier feel. It was an odd reassurance, to be so connected to so small a thing as the smell of a tenacious, wiry plant, but it is there as sure as air in my lungs and blood in my veins—though not born to it, I am still a Wyomingite myself ... an adopted child of my chosen homeland. Inextricably, it is there to come back to; inexplicably, it is never far away—even when it is.

I remember now.