August 23, 2017: Moab

There is a severe beauty of this intense landscape, an otherworldly quiet, with almost a passive harshness.

The first plein air of the day started at the noontime hour. We again set up along Willow Creek Road. The heat rose off the arid landscape in waves. It seemed everyone had closed up shop for the lunchtime hour, including ants, flies, and other buggers that had escaped the heat in hiding. Lizards and birds were also on a midday siesta. Even the clouds seemed to be slumbering in the stark clear day.

The hot dead air was sharply quiet, almost like someone pressed pause, and life only to resumed to play once the wind kicked the landscape into life again. However, the wind didn’t seem to affect anything except the loose red dirt. The stiff flora stood tall and firm in their place, unshaken and untouched. The sporadic wind offered a brief respite from the blanket of heat that draped over my body. I practically held my breath during the pause.

Wandering into the past

As I watched the stillness, my mind wandered to Grant. Later, I couldn’t trace the origins of my thoughts to his memory.

Grant had the sweetest voice and funny disposition. In 1994, he died shortly after my mom passed, maybe a month or two later. I remember completely losing it at work when I was told the news—my world had been touched again by the death of someone too young. Grant was 3 or 4 years old. He was a twin. He choked on a stupid chicken nugget happy meal. My mom hated McDonald’s, and she renamed it McYucks. Charlotte, his twin, used to call me Miss Priss. I was their afternoon preschool teacher at Franklin Barn Children’s Center in Herndon, Virginia. After his death, I babysat Charlotte on an occasional weekend. She would talk of her brother.

Perhaps it was the barren harsh landscape that reminded me of Grant and his Charlotte. I wonder how Charlotte survived life after the death of her twin.

Grief and recovery

I took a photo of Grant the week before he died. I loved taking photos of all my kiddos. Their sweet smiles and personalities offered my broken heart a brief moment of joy.

In the photo, Grant is looking down at me from a playground ladder. He is wearing a blue windbreaker, with the hood up and cinched around his round cheeks. His left hand holds his mother’s two sizes too big sunglasses on his little nose.

Preparing for the worst

As memories of Charlotte and her Grant lifted up through my memory, the wind followed suit and began to blow. Just beyond the truck, a dust devil was building momentum. I barely had time to tell Rex a “dust thing” was coming.

Heads down, and eyes closed, the devil ripped through our canopy, and blew the hat right off of Rex’s head. I opened my eyes three seconds in to see the tent canopy’s metal frame collapsing from the force. I jumped up to secure the folding poles, fearful it would smack Rex in the head. In the end, we were safe. Rex continued to paint, while I was paranoid that another dirt devil was just waiting in the wings.

Death, like a dust devil, is almost impossible to prepare for.