The frontier is in the air today.
I’m out exploring.
A country drive took me here.
But then, I can’t leave home without a country drive.
Sometimes it still amazes me that I get to live in such a beautiful place,
the quiet of a country lane.
It’s not where I grew up.
But then, it is, I suppose.
In a way. A lot of ways.
I glance down at my “Made in Mexico” cowgirl boots.
I brush aside a windswept strand of hair–
rusty-raven like I could have been a San Antonio señorita.
I think about cisterns and cattle auctions.
The buildings facing me still have false fronts.
1887 is branded on the peak of one.
Below it, I can’t take my eyes off
the prettiest shade of blue I’ve seen all day.
Better than denim and bluebonnets
and the Texas sky in April.
It looks like promise.
Blue like water.
Life, on the prairie.
Almost like the ceiling of an old Southern front porch.
Blue like “let’s put down roots.”
A spring, a hope.
Bluer than eastern ocean, bluer than western sky.
It’s the blue of a frontier lullaby,
the blue of dreams a mile high.
Dreams you chase down with a covered wagon and an axe.
It’s an unseen destination.
A journey yet uncharted.
It’s an eastern girl realizing she might just be a western girl.
And she’s not sure how it happened,
only that it’s who she is. Somehow.
Whatever that means–a western girl.
She feels it–a happy kind of blue.
The pioneers who look back never make it.
The ones who paved the west weren’t born westerners.
It’s who you become.
Life out here, it’s still a little bit younger and wilder and freer.
A happy kind of blue.