Bittersweet return to Usery Mountain, Mesa

We got down from Pioneer Pass without incident, driving less than 5 mph for over five miles. We left early in the morning, shortly after it was light enough to see the road, because I did not want to meet anyone on the steep one-lane road. Unless we happened to meet at a place where the road was wide enough for two to pass, the other driver, since s/he would be coming up the mountain, would have the right of way, meaning I would have to back up if one of us needed to. I did NOT want to have to back up.

Vicky's job was to catch glimpses of the road ahead, looking for other vehicles so I concentrate on driving slowly and using the brake as infrequently as I could.

We really liked Pioneer Pass, and will return.

But boy is that road steep, and do the drop-offs ever go forever.












Our first order of business after we got down was to wash the camper and the bikes.





The second order of business was to find a McDonalds so I could get an Egg McMuffin and coffee.

We drove to Mesa along some beautiful stretch of highway.








And arrived in Mesa well before noon. We had reservations at the campground we stayed at several nights last winter when we were here to visit my parents and, after my father died, when my sister and brother-in-law arrived.

It all felt a bit unreal to me--being here reminding me so much of the 20+ years my parents lived here happily, and of the dozens of times I visited them.The rituals we had, many focused on eating of course, on their favorite restaurants and on the meals my mother prepared, especially her noodles.

I can so easily and vividly picture my father hunched over his computer in the Arizona room playing free cell, and how they would decorate their house for Christmas, anticipating the arrival of children, children-in-laws, grandchildren, and, later, great-grandchildren.

When I first started coming to Mesa I would see them waiting at the gate at the airport (remember when you could do that? It wasn't really all that long ago), then we would call and they would drive to the arrival area. As time made driving more difficult either the shuttle would be taken to their home and then a rental car because they no longer had a car. My father's aging reflected in how one got from the airport to their home, and now his death makes even that nonexistent.

Someone else lives in that home in Leisure World now, and in that apartment at the Springs, the extended care facility where they lived the final three years in Mesa and where Vicky and I traveled to last April to move my mother to Fort Collins where she is now.

The inescapable fact is that I miss my father, but mostly want him to still be alive--to still be watching movies on TV, playing free cell on the computer, and trying mightily to hear my mother because his hearing was mostly gone.

He married us, me and Vicky, as well as Bill and Kathy, and Sean and Emily, and was scheduled to marry Jules and Jessica until my mother experienced some health problems at the last minute and they couldn't make it. His marriage ceremony for my and Vicky an heroic act of will, given he had so little strength and mostly gasped for breath his last few months when the COPD that he was not responsible for destroyed his lungs.

Tomorrow night Vicky and I are going to the restaurant that represented all of his favorite restaurants to me, the one we went to most frequently by far--Serannos. As I am doing now I will think about my parents living here, and all of the things we did together for those many years. A couple of years ago, while visiting them, we went there and stayed for about three hours, as I talked a lot about what I remembered from my childhood--trying to communicate how grateful I was. I know my parents appreciated that, and if I could do one thing in my life over, and only one thing, I would have tried to have another of those events so I could be sure that my father knew, before he died, what he and my mother did for my life.