The Left Turn

It was August 1996 and I had just completed a week's writer's retreat in Taos, New Mexico with Natalie Goldberg. I was high, euphoric. My writer-self slammed open a high, long double door and made her entrance. She was huge and wild and free.

I was yearning, now, to leave the dry, parched desert and go north into Colorado to Pagosa Springs to see Paul and Carla who lived there now. I craved damp woods and pine trees, shade and cool breezes. Driving across the desert, across the deep gorge of the Rio Grande, I was bursting to write.

I began ascending and felt the air changing. Trees began to appear, leaving sage and scrub behind. I was on a back road in Northern New Mexico, almost to the Colorado border. Around a curve on my left came a small row of log cabins, surrounded by tall ponderosa pines and cottonwood trees. Behind the cabins gurgled a good-size creek. I immediately turned left into a driveway and followed the sign that said "Office".

I rented a small, old-fashioned cabin. Knotty pine walls, a lumpy double bed that sagged with a clean, worn green coverlet. Clean and frayed kitchen towels and dishes that didn't match. A screened porch looked out to the creek. I called my friends to say I was running a few days behind. There was a greasy spoon café and a small grocery store next to the cabin property. I stayed three days.

My writing pen raced across pages and pages. Words tumbled and turned like the mountain water in the stream. Cool breezes came to me and I took long walks along the stream with Rosie, my then-Lab-my blonde sweetheart who went everywhere with me, even to writing retreats. Rosie splashed in the creek and chased squirrels and gophers; I wrote. Astonished at the geyser of words, letters, thoughts that had been dormant in that other person who was afraid to call herself a writer. I found real paradise along the side of a back woods road through the pine forest, so glad I made that left turn in the blink of an eye.