On the pain of time passing, Texan dust storms and the big lie of trad-wife homesteading
Being in West Texas made me think of the movement of time, and being on the prairies also made me think of the fantasy lie of the "romance" of homesteading trad wives love to promote on social media.
People talk about the special magic quality to the light in California, but the light that’s really changed the way I experience my life is in west Texas. I drove back into that light a week ago; twelve hundred miles over five days through the Texas Panhandle from Amarillo on down to Alpine, the tiny town of close to the Mexican border, waking to dawns the colour of a bruised peach.
There’s a brilliance to the cobalt blue horizons which stretch forever, but there’s a special kind of fragile beauty to the brown and pink dawn light which bruises across the early morning sky; that colour of sky is like nothing I’ve seen before, and it’s a colour that almost feels shy in contrast to the huge, bold scale of the landscape. I lived in that landscape in my twenties, but went back there, alone, last week looking for something I couldn’t really name.
