Willie Nelson released his album Stardust in 1978, five years before I was born. In 2007, I ordered the album on CD for my dad, as a replacement for his old vinyl copy and I heard it for the first time. At first, I listened to the album because it was a way to feel closer to my dad, but in no time at all I grew to love the album as my own, and I began to love Willie as well and stretched my listening into other albums. He now has the biggest presence in my music collection by a wide margin - (I buy every Willie cassette I come across) - and is my second favorite artist of all time.
Last October Benjamin and I loaded up and headed south for the winter. We spent the majority of our time in Texas, six months in fact, and spent our time there traveling to many of its remote corners. Despite us both being born and raised in Texas, I’d never seen Big Bend, he’d never seen the Texas coast, and neither of us had ever ventured deep into the south into the Rio Grande Valley. We remedied that during our travels while also enjoying much time in the Hill Country and the Panhandle as well.
These travels were transformative and these places crawled in and nestled themselves under my skin and in my heart. They became a part of me. And since returning to the Pacific Northwest, I admit I’ve been homesick for Texas, sometimes deeply.
I miss Big Bend in springtime during a superbloom when the whole desert was filled with unexpected color: vibrant bluebonnets filling the foreground of the landscape with the vibrantly colored, red, brown, and purple Chisos mountains providing the backdrop, gray-green prickly-pears with frilly, vibrant yellow and prink blossoms, rainbow cacti dressed in colorful stripes and topped with flowers, and yuccas of all kinds dotting the landscape and topped with fluffy, cream-colored blooms. The mesquites were a fresh spring green against the bright blue sky and filled with the song and flashes of color of songbirds and woodpeckers we’d never seen before. The cottonwood grove held a sleeping long-eared owl bobbing on its windswept perch.
I miss the Rio Grande Valley with all of its stunning wildflowers and spectacular birds. The gulls laughed at me as we camped along the Arroyo Colorado. A single great blue heron, so bountifully seen in great numbers at the nesting site near our previous home, and still I was impressed with its majesty. The shore birds bobbed and weaved as waves rolled in and out from the gulf. Green jays eluded us, hiding adeptly in the trees and filling the air with their calls. Vibrantly colored kingbirds flitted through the trees and hawks circled high above the treeline along their migratory corridor.
I miss the long stretches of sandy beaches along the preserved portion of the Texas seashore. The shoreline is free of rocks and the water is warm. The waves roll in long and low and are perfect for gliding into shore on. While the PNW coast has its own indescribable beauty, the Texas coast is for frolicking like a carefree child. I did just that and it was magical.
I miss the Hill Country whose beautiful rivers carve through soft, white limestone and the majesty that comes with knowing that flash floods can appear suddenly even on the sunniest of days and turn a tranquil stream into a deadly torrent in mere minutes while raising the water-level many feet up into the trees. I miss the cedars [they’re actually ashe junipers, but everyone calls them cedars] that cover the landscape with their reddish bark and dark green canopies. Golden-Cheeked Warblers call these trees home during the breeding season. They only nest in central Texas, nowhere else, and are increasingly uncommon due to habitat loss. On our last day there, we spotted a nesting pair of these beautiful birds, a birding dream come true. I miss the wildflowers covering the highways of west Texas with extravagant carpets of color, mostly in shades of bluebonnet blues and paintbrush reds, with smatterings of yellows, maroons and primrose pinks.
I miss the wide skies filled with painted sunsets and endless stars. We savored these skies in Big Bend, in the valley, along the seashore, in the Hill Country, in the Panhandle, and in west Texas. I began to know constellations, planets, and star clusters in those winter-spring skies - celestial friends inaccessible to me in the cloud-covered, light-filled city that I call home in the PNW.
And, I miss my family and the land that’s been tended by them for four generations. I miss long visits with my grandmother and the stories she would tell me about local and family history. I miss my mom cooking meals for us in the kitchen while my dad watches TV. I miss the large and wild garden outside of the guest-room window - tended by my mother and started by her grandmother. I miss the birds that gather there at the feeders and bath, some of them coming right up to the window to peer inside. I miss the lilac bushes and honeysuckle that have grown there my whole life and the pecan trees planted by my great-grandparents and grandfather. There are the friendly springtime weeds I used to pick bouquets of as a child, mistletoe growing in mesquite trees, a garden, several fruit trees, and my decrepit old treehouse, long since unfit for occupancy. I know the plants, the land, the people there, and I miss them.
This past weekend I took a collage class and intended to make a couple of gorgeous prickly pear illustrations my main subjects. As I endlessly cut around the tiny spines I considered how I might like to feature them. I found myself once again contemplating the homesickness I’ve felt for these pieces of Texas that integrated into me and began to consider an homage of sorts to our travels.
The idea of the bird came first, then the music which ties into the birdsong. After delicately cutting around the small cactus spines all day, I headed to the thrift store that evening seeking music for the piece that was evolving in my head all day. I was most surprised and delighted to find a stack of vintage sheet music at the thrift store that evening - and in that stack: Stardust. I knew I’d found the song to best share all of my memories and missing of our Texas travels. The next day I tore the star-filled cover and music notations it into strips, retyped the lyrics (so I could position them beneath the music just as I needed so they would show in-between the cactuses and be readable) and selected words to create a beautiful poem out of the song lyrics, laid out with its music.
A star-filled sky, yellow-flowered prickly pears, and a golden cheeked warbler. A fitting tribute to these memories I savor and the places (and inhabitants) that I miss.
little stars
away,
meadows of my heart.