I came to Palm Springs to finish a book and to be warm. Both ambitions seemed reasonable from the plane. Both, it turned out, required some renegotiation on the ground.
It was supposed to be a small group. It became a slightly less small group, which is how these things always go. My sister flew in. Leslie and Jeff drove down from where they had landed earlier. A fourth came too — someone I had thought of as a close friend at the time, and who I would, by the end of that following year, be quietly stepping back from. You do not always know the last good week of a friendship while you're inside it. Sometimes the photos tell you later.
The mornings were ours. Coffee on the patio, the mountains doing their daily impression of being on fire. The middays were too bright to argue with, so we mostly didn't. The evenings were the long, slow, slightly-too-much-wine evenings that desert towns specialize in. Conversations started gentle and ended honest. A couple of those conversations are still doing work in me.
Full Moon in Palm Springs
Beneath the Palm Springs sky it swells, A lustrous orb in vast repose, Against the dark, it softly tells. Of desert secrets, dusk bestows.
Read it in Echoes: Whispers From The Soul →I closed the manuscript on a Tuesday, in pajamas, with the door open and the dry desert wind coming through the screen. There was no ceremony. I did not announce it. I made another coffee and sat with the closed file for fifteen minutes and let myself be glad in private. That is the only kind of finishing that has ever felt true to me — the kind where no one is watching and you do not need them to be.
Christmas itself was small. A cooked meal, a few candles, the easy laughter that happens when nobody is performing. I missed my father quietly, the way I always do at the holidays — not as a wound, more as a presence I keep a chair for. He would have loved the dry heat. He would have hated the rental's espresso machine. Both of those things felt true at once.
I came home with a finished manuscript, a tan that the New Mexico altitude removed within a week, and the beginning of an understanding about which of those friendships had been a season and which were going to last. Both kinds matter. They just don't get the same poem.