El Saladar

Today was my daughter's 18th birthday. She feels she's at a big point in her life and is very sensitive to the ups and downs life rolls in like waves day by day. It's hard to get her to see all the great things in her life when she's down. How loved she is. How lovely she is. How beautiful. What a fantastic friend she is to others. She has a brilliant sense of humour. I try to be there for her when she can't see any of this for the insecure head-nonsense that coming of age brings. Tell her that these things don't just go away and are part of life, but we can learn tricks that make the downs a bit more bearable. Learning to see them as just fleeting is the trick I've learned that helps me through the troughs.

Anyway. Today she and her brother had a birthday lunch with some of their friends from when they lived here. We went back to theirs after and the photo is of the house we lived in for four years, which is next door to their pals.
Looking at this brings back a lot of memories. If you can see the staircase that leads to the roof, then you can imagine the happy times we had there. Eating, laughing, reading, drinking, thinking. It overlooks the fields of the pueblo to a range of Sierras that saw the skyline into gorgeous angles, cuts and throws the light into dusky shade. So many nights watching the sun set and bleed the skyline blood-orange. So much happened in that house that really can't be captured in a blip. It's just a building, a building without inhabitants at the moment. And a building without inhabitants is a building that doesn't dream.