Every time I spend more than a night somewhere, I grow a little attached and don’t want to leave. Part of that is the wonderful reunions I’ve had with friends I haven’t seen in years—20 years, in some cases.
Leslie Crow and I were best friends in middle school. We’d go thrift shopping in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, listen to the Grateful Dead, make art, and talk about boys. Not a lot has changed, despite having more or less lost touch for two decades, after we both split town after high school.
Leslie still has that wild-west hippie kind of spirit about her. A free spirit, if I’ve ever met one. Always has been. The walls of her little A-frame cabin outside of Austin are covered with her paintings, dried flowers hanging from string, woven blankets, and tapestries. Every inch of floor and wall and table space is occupied by interesting things.
I think she’s the most creative person I know. And she’s never compromised to take a “day job”; she’s found a way to make a living—and a life—on her own terms since she finished high school and left Maryland. She went to LA first and was a model there for 12 years. Then she moved to a farm in Austin eight years ago (and lived in Tucson, at one point). Now she makes hand-sewn leather bags and clothing and sells her custom work (pieces of art, really) primarily online, although she recently canceled her wifi and in retrospect realized that running an online business without wifi is kind of difficult. But with that same stubborn determination that got her out of Maryland and working for herself, she’s pushing forward without wifi.
“I didn’t realize until it was gone how much time I’d just be scrolling through Instagram or looking things up,” she said, her eyes widening. “It was just lost time.”
It was all very inspiring. Mostly the part about being completely self-sustainable for 20 years and blazing her own trail.
We walked around the farm to feed the goats and pigs and horses and a donkey. The farm was founded in the 1960s, not as a commune, per se, but more as a collective—little houses forming a small community. It was nicknamed the Funny Farm because a comedy troupe lived there in those days. Luckily for Leslie (and me), the communal swimming pool sits right behind her house, so she has it to herself most of the time.
That first night at her house, I started in on a bottle of some fancy botanical gin I’d bought a few states back. It smelled like perfume and went down real smooth. We sat on her front porch for hours, smoking rolled tobacco, drinking, and in a round-about way, catching up on the past 20 years. We talked about our creative work and the book we should write together (we’ve always had lists of ideas to work on together).
“I have young girls coming up to me at shows, telling me how I’ve inspired them,” she told me. “That’s all I want to do—show this next generation that it’s possible—and it’s cool—to live on a farm and raise animals and make art, and that you can do it.”
Cicadas buzzed and bounced around the porch as I contemplated my life and hers. She warned me about a neighborhood skunk that she’d befriended. I looked up her natal chart. We talked about everyone we know from back home, including people who had died. We talked about spirituality and visions and road trips and people we’ve met along the way. We talked about health and what the secret is for aging gracefully.
“I got every wrinkle I have during the two years I was living in Arizona,” she told me.
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“I kind of like that weathered, desert look.”
I passed out fast that night and didn’t seem to mind there being no AC. She created a little bed for me—pillows on the floor with an Our Lady of Guadalupe blanket on top. It was a room that she’d originally intended to be her work studio, although her work was strewn about the house—on her wooden table, on the floor.
The next day, we hiked around the farm, worked up a sweat (not difficult in Texas in July), and then slipped into the little pool, cooling off in and taking in the little paradise that it was—surrounded by fields of flowers and trees, and butterflies and grasshoppers that would occasionally fall into the pool. Leslie saved them all. She liked to put on puppet shows with the grasshoppers before releasing them, but she was like the patron saint of the insects that had fallen into the pool.
Going to visit Angie, who I hadn’t seen in several—eight?—years, I immediately felt the dichotomy between the two friends and wondered if they represented different aspects of myself—or my past—or if I was just thinking too much. Angie is more disciplined. She’s funny and fun and deep. She’s one of those people who seem to never lose their composure. She lives in the city and works as a massage therapist and goes swimming several times a week and is also an amazing aerial dancer, takes belly dancing classes, and knows all the cool new spots in the city—like the bar where you have to walk into a separate interior door that opens up into another bar, speakeasy style, and the Thai restaurant in her SoCo neighborhood—“the Manhattan of Austin,” as she called it—that sells 12 exotic flavors of coconut milk ice cream, like spirulina mint chocolate chip and lavender caramel (those were the first two that I tried, and I fell in love with both).
I laid out my sleeping bag on her couch after we’d walked along the Colorado River to see the city skyline at night. Austin is like one of those utopian cities. It would be really easy to live there. It has everything you’d want, unless you want blue-collar grit and that stimulating sort of electricity that is synonymous with big East Coast cities.
“This house is getting bulldozed this year and replaced with condos,” she told me, as we were getting ready for bed. “It’s happening all over the city. Everywhere. All these historic neighborhoods are disappearing.”
We talked about spirituality and the past and love interests and Austin and Hagerstown and mutual friends and work and the cost of living and what we’ve been doing with our lives until we seemingly ran out of things worth catching up on and could hang out in the present moment.
When the sun was high in the sky again, she took me to Barton Springs, a magical place in town where a gigantic swimming pool is fed by a natural spring and stays at 68 degrees year-round. We swam across its intimidating width (you can’t stand anywhere), swam back, laid on a blanket to dry in the sun, then jumped back in a few more times before leaving.
After five days in Austin with Leslie and Angie, it felt like I had to rip off a little piece of my heart to slip away and get back into the mentality of movement, the nomadic life. I was so grateful for all of it—just sitting in the same room with two people who, at one time in my life, were my go-to people. It’s as if once you reach a certain level of intimacy with another human being, that connection can never be erased, even if people change (do people ever really change?).
All the while, I was thinking about Mercury, which was going retrograde, along with several other planets that are retrograde this summer. What a perfect time to revisit old friends and reconnect with past versions of yourself. These retrogrades bring reunion. They bring back into your life the people, places, and things that need revisited—where the work isn’t done, where there is some sort of unfinished business or unrest, where the story isn’t over.
In a broader sense, all of this—this whole life on the road—is a long-ago idea revisited. It’s the way I’ve always wanted to live, the dream I’d always come back to.