Pat Bean's blog

I didn’t get my Texas bluebonnet fix this year. The isolation curfew kept me home here in Tucson. But at least I have my memories. This photo was shot on Goose Island State Park a few years ago. — Photo by Pat Bean.

“I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part and discuss it only with consenting adults.” – Molly Ivins

But My Soul Requires Mountains

I’m a transplanted Texan, but the Lone Star State has a grip on my heart, even after half a century of living elsewhere.

My old Texas roots wink at me from a hoopoe-pecking oil rig sitting in a meadow full of bluebonnets when I go home to visit family once or twice a year; they wave at me when I pass a field full of cotton ready to be harvested, jogging my memory of the story my mother told about her father picking cotton during the Great Depression so she could have a prom dress.

A drive to the top of Mount Lemmon on Sky Island Parkway is just minutes away. I think I will break the isolation curfew and drive it this weekend. It will make up for missing Texas’ bluebonnets. — Photo by Pat Bean

The sight of a mockingbird brazenly flashing the white on its gray wings takes me back to the apricot tree that sat in my grandmother’s large garden. Almost every piece of ripened fruit I picked had first been tasted by one of these noisy Texas state birds.

My memory then morphs from mockingbirds to me as a little girl sitting on the tall back steps of my grandmother’s home eating her freshly baked pralines until I made myself sick.

I sat on those same steps often each afternoon as I waited for the silver Texas Zephyr to roar past on the railroad tracks beyond the vacant field behind the house. I always waved at the engineer and imagined that the whistle, blown as the train neared the crossing, was sounded just for me.

Perhaps I did inherit my grandfather’s wanderlust, as my mother told me, but I think that Texas Zephyr might have roared its ways into my veins as well.    Where had it been? Where was it going? I wanted to go, too – and over the years I did.

My grandmother, whom I adored, was a Texan through and through. She said if a person wasn’t born in Texas than they didn’t deserve to be. It’s an attitude difficult for non-Texans to understand. It also an attitude not likely to earn friends – yet I have it.

But while I truly feel Texan through and through, I’ve chosen to live the latter and longest portion of my life among the mountains, first living and working next to the Wasatch Range in Utah, then visiting as many mountains as I could, and now nesting next to the Santa Catalina Range in Arizona.

My life doesn’t feel right if I can’t watch the daily changing moods of a mountain, and feel the comfort of its sturdiness as the years of my life race by.

How does this flatlander Texan — the person who goes back home and almost weeps with delight as truck drivers tip their hats at me as I pass them on one back road or another — feel about this dichotomy?

It’s mind-boggling. All I can think is that while my roots are planted in Texas soil, I’m thankful the dirt has been rich enough to let me flourish wherever my feet have taken me.

Bean Pat: One of my favorite Texas bloggers. https://pitsfritztow nnews.wordpress.com/2020/05/15/mama-with-twins/

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Pat Bean is a retired journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon, and is always searching for life’s silver lining.