In the first true pine-covered night I sleep for twelve hours in one stretch and I wake alone, except for one particular feline friend.

Was it exhaustion? Elevation? Elation? All three and more.

A few steps beneath the pines is a nice old state route road.

A few more steps along it, there is another fine coffee shop, and this one serves really great food too.

We feast on breakfast burritos, on the sandwich of egg and bagel, and drink deep of the brew.

We spend a long moment in the lot and in love.

I have to take the rental back down now, for now. But in the moment all is well.

By the time I make it back to the part that isn’t quite yet amazingly pretty, I stop, and here in nowhere there is cold Pellegino in glass bottles.

It is most assuredly a sign.

The second stop is south of the populated hell. It’s for smoke. I’m still fighting it. Eventually I’ll win, but not today.

The third stop is in population too, and it’s brutally depressing on one level. There are a dozen motorcycle cops goofing around in the lot on some kind of mass break. None of them have masks. Neither do the dozens of customers. Neither do the cashiers. I’m the only one. I do my business and go.

I pack the bags into my own car and dump the rental at the utterly abandoned airport.

In spite of being the only visible customer, I end up having to walk back to the long-term parking. The clerk is apologetic in an offhand and pretty surly way. Fuck him. I’m done. It’s time to go "home" and to repack.

In the smaller town I stop for the fifth and final time, to stock a few things for the fridge that’s been abandoned these few days. Mainly it’s coffee milk I’m after. Almost no one here is masked either. Unprotected children give me long stares, sometimes from closer than six feet. Good luck, kid, Jesus. With a mother like that you’ll need it.

I snake my habitual back road where the myth of this being the place of the javelina was born, and yet I see no pigs, of any kind.

And then I am back. There has been no fire, and the cat lives yet. She may be glad to see me but it’s hard to tell. Certainly she is glad to have her almost empty water dish refreshed.

Meanwhile. There is a place. Eighty miles out the other way from the pines and the breakfast burritos. It’s functional and ugly and the trees are just cottonwoods and a couple of mesquite. There’s too much concrete and not enough weeds. The water is currently broken.

But for better or worse it’s my place, in a way this one will never be.

There are a number of jobs to take care of quite soon.

Getting back to the pineless nowhere place is the main one.

Getting back to caught up feels good.