A few months ago I traveled from my home in Boston back to the town where I went to college: Portales, N.M. The college is Eastern New Mexico University, a jewel of southeast New Mexico and home of the Greyhounds sports teams. I was going to be in Phoenix for a few days and had decided to tack on an extra four nights – the plan was to stay two days in Sante Fe, doing the art galleries, and then head out in my rental car for Portales, which is about four hours southeast. I had not been to Portales for 25 years and had sometimes wondered if it even still existed.

 

Before I left Boston, I had gotten that horrible late-spring cold – chills, come-and-go fever and a sore throat, and by the time I hit Sante Fe, I was living on hot tea with lemon and Alka Seltzer cold tablets at night, watching them dissolve as I listened to the New Mexico news and farm reports. I worked out each night in the gym of whatever hotel I was staying at, and I was careful to call my parents and husband frequently, as I had been the type to drop off the map in college, and I had worried people. I would explain the different things I had seen traveling (the Georgia O’Keefe museum, an alley cat with three legs, rose-colored adobe homes, purple mountain ranges) and give a detailed plan for my travel the next day. Then I would shut my eyes, exhausted, and fall into dreamless sleep, my head on an unfamiliar crisp pillow.

 

Portales was a place I had thought of often and sometimes dreamed about. I left at 21 with a life in disarray: a first love that had ended suddenly and strangely, barely passing grades, parents who had separated, painfully, then happily reconciled (I had yet to live with them as a couple again, and didn’t know how that would be), and some new and potentially troubling health problems. Portales was unfinished business for me – I left at school break for my home in Maryland and never came back. I had to resolve my health issues – it turned out I didn’t have seizures, as was feared, but the onset of disabling migraines – and soon after that, in a crowded college-age crowd on a St. Patrick’s Day eve, I met the man I would marry. Plans changed. When I thought about Portales, it was quickly, as if I wanted to push the place of so much change and disappointment and failure out of my mind. I laughed at and about Portales, and I privately wondered and disseminated myself as I had been in college. I had shared so little of my worries and concerns – of me – with anyone back then that my behavior, in the face of what they knew to be hard situations, made it seem as if I didn’t care about anything. I did care; I just had that condition that all of us suffer from at one time or another: youth. 

 

As I drove my rental car (an enormous, silver Chrysler with the world’s coldest sir conditioning) away from Sante Fe, I felt a lightness and anticipation. The miles stretched out into endless ranch scenes and dazzling skies as the weather, which had been snowy, cleared, and the sun shone brightly. I listened to everything on satellite radio – politics, jazz, gospel, you name it. Not passing a car for about 40 miles, I called my 18-year-old and said, “Hey Matt – guess how fast I’m driving?” He laughed, miles away. He felt so close, though, his voice warm on the phone. How fast was I going, he wanted to know, and yelled, “All right!” when I told him 100 mph – and no one to stop me. I hated to let him go when we signed off.

 

I passed a few towns that, in the time I’ve been away, simply disappeared; abandoned and overgrown, its residents moving on. I finally came to Portales itself, and I felt nothing but pure happiness and renewal – I was a grown woman now; I was seeing this through wiser eyes.

 

In Portales, I met a deputy sheriff, toured the college and stood on a bridge that runs over the highway and connects campus to the field house. I proudly bought ENMU sportswear for my family. There was a stone greyhound statue, (the ENMU mascot) in front of the Campus Union Building, that I hadn’t remembered. I patted his cold, hard head and took his picture.

 

I drove by a house I once lived in and stopped in my big silver car across the street. Trash spilled out along the porch, and laundry hung from a crooked line in the dirt back yard. I went to the door, hesitantly, and knocked, to inquire as to whether I might take a picture. I peeked inside; it looked so small now! A child’s wheelchair sat in the corner.

 

And before I left, I said goodbye – to that girl I had been. I forgave her her deficits, and I admired her guts. And like in TV shows where ghostly characters wave goodbye after being vindicated by strangers who care, I looked down the broken sidewalk and saw my college self, slender and serious, and always worried. She turned, and waved, and walked away, into nothing. I turned around my Chrysler, headed for the highway, and passed the back of the sign that said “Welcome to Portales.” Then I turned on the radio, punched the gas, and got the hell out of Dodge.