I never anticipated the feeling of “home” I would get in a state I only lived in for the first 2 years of my life. Coming back and just being within it’s borders stirs up ghosts from the past and echos from relatives long gone.
“OMG! THAT IS APACHE FALLS!” I said just a few weeks ago in the White Mountains of Northern Arizona. Like some kind of movie flashback, I see my mom in a small restroom area changing my brothers diaper & swearing to god he would be potty trained before we went back to Wyoming. I was SUPER excited to see a big waterfall, but my memory in that exact moment only included that frustration my mom was going through and the walk back to my Grandparents motorhome. I could see a bridge down by the rest area but didn’t remember us being on it. I only remembered being disappointed that we didn’t see the waterfall and pretty much blamed that on my baby brothers full diaper that had exploded when mom picked him up.
As I stood at the lookout from above, I was overcome with emotion. A 46 year old woman yelling to her husband and 2 best friends that I remembered being here as a kid & super excited to finally see the falls I had forgotten! But someone was missing…I then began crying for my mom. In the most amazing gentle way I was comforted and reminded that she is always with me and shows herself in BIG SPIRITUAL ways. But in that moment, I didn’t feel her around at all. We drove down and after a quick stop at a cool abandoned building with graffiti, we pulled into the parking lot. Nothing looked familiar per se but it felt familiar. I used the restroom not expecting to see anything recognizable because 1) I was 6 when I was here and mostly remember that diaper exploding and 2) This was clearly a newer building and newer landscaping. When I emerged, my friends and husband were on the bridge and I walked to them. I felt a haunted feeling and then saw the wide stretching white water cascading over rocks that was technically considered “falls”. I chuckled thinking “That is what I missed! It is no wonder you forgot about this in general.” But then, a small decorative cutout in the tresses of the iron bridge snagged my intuition…I had stood here before. I took a picture and my bestie said she got one through there also. We remarked on the one single padlock someone had placed on the iron mesh and then we meandered off to the vehicle.
I briefly mentioned in a previous blog that I had moved to Wyoming with my parents when I was 2. At that time we were living in Phoenix not far from Tempe where my mom’s parents lived. I have 3 memories from our house on East Sheridan St. I remember spraying water out of a hose with my dad by putting my hand on the end of the hose, when he only needed to use his thumb. I got in big trouble for running through sorted clothes piles on laundry day and told my grandma that my mom was mean. Then I vividly recall my grandparents coming to get me because there was a flash flood (so I was told when I was older) and taking me with them while mom and dad made sure our stuff in the house would be ok. Evidently our house wasn’t in REAL danger but my parents didn’t have much. What they had they wanted to keep safe. I on the other hand thought I was going to live with Grandma and Grandpa and threw a huge fit when my parents came to bring me home the next day. (I was a bratty little girl! Haha) Those are my only memories of Arizona as a resident, which I feel for being only 2 is pretty remarkable!
The visits to Grandma and Grandpas tho… THOSE were the absolute best! See, mom had no desire to leave Arizona. She had moved there from Michigan when she was younger, graduated from Tempe High School, lived hippy life in Sedona for a couple of years, and was living a fun life with her best girlfriend Carol when she met my dad. At a dive bar called The Blue Door, my dad accidentally hit my mom in the back of the head with the cap from a Budweiser bottle and the rest is history. The married in my Grandparents backyard and moved to Flagstaff where they managed a motel (that’s now a parking lot). Not too much later moms belly swelled with my growth as our family dog Ginger watched in wonder. My parents moved to that house on Sheridan before my birth so mom could have her mom closer and I came into the world at the Maricopa County Hospital on December 17, 1975. Side note: My name was almost “Jenifer” because I was born during a nighttime episode of my mom’s favorite soap opera Days of Our Lives. Mom had me as Laura was having Jenifer and almost had me in the car because she didn’t want to miss the episode…they brought a TV into the labor room cuz she threw a fit! Lol
When we moved to Wyoming, it was to be closer to my dads side of the family, and my dad was DONE with Arizona heat. My Grandparents would come up to Wyoming every summer in their motorhome and often we would travel back to Arizona with them to visit and fly home. During those trips back down south, we would stop in all the popular places on our way. We traveled all over the Grand Canyon area, stayed at KOA campgrounds in places such as Flagstaff (where the location of my conception was pointed out to me! Haha), and explored Northern Arizona mountains and tourist traps. I spent a majority of the time on the top bunk of the “kids room” doing word searches and singing along loudly and badly with the old country music my Gramps always cued up. When you’re a kid it isn’t about the journey, it’s about the destination. Most of the time I had no clue where we were going, where we had been, and didn’t care as long as I got to explore when we got there. Looking back, I’m not even sure of all the places we went, but like Apache Falls, when I hear the name, it rings a bell. (The small town of Concho had the same effect)
When we were done traveling around we would spend a week or so at Grandma and Grandpa’s soaking in the Phoenix heat! Although we moved when I was 2, I never got over my love of triple digit temps. I also never acclimated to -30 that Wyoming is famous for. UGH! During this time we would spend lots of quality time with my favorite cousin who feels more like my sister, go to neat places to eat that we didn’t have at home, go see the skyscrapers, have get togethers with extended family, laugh a shit ton, and once my grandpa even drove down Van Buren St because I didn’t believe there were actual prostitutes so he felt the need to prove it to me! Haha (I was 16 or 17 so don’t get all judgmental). My mom was so relaxed and comfortable and we felt like we were just at our other house. This always confused me as a kid because we were over 1,000 miles apart from this place, only saw these people once a year, visits back down to Phoenix became less frequent as we got older, and yet it always felt like home.
As an adult I now know we were feeding off of moms vibes. She WAS home and felt so happy and centered being back. One place we never visited during those trips down in the motor home or the flights down for Christmas was Sedona. I always asked and was told it was out of the way or there wasn’t time. Then it happened… We made a straight through trip from Wyoming because my grandpa had a heart attack and grandma felt mom should come. He was OK but mom jumped at the chance to come back at the request of grandma. As we hit Flagstaff mom looked at me and said “We are taking a detour. It’s time for me to go back to Sedona & you need a memory of being there with me in case we don’t ever make one of these trips again.” I FREAKED OUT!! This place had built itself up in my mind with stories from my mom and we were FINALLY going!
Now the drive there is foggy in my memory but I remember seeing the huge church built into the red walls and red cliffs and walls that were deeper than anything I had ever seen. She seemed to be looking for something specific as we drove by quaint shops with crystals hanging in the windows. We parked in front of one of them and left my pre-teen brother sleeping in the back seat and got out. We walked in to look at all the crystals, metaphysical/holistic items and as my mom glanced at a price tag she told me, an 18 year old, to cross my arms and not touch anything. I asked if it was cursed or not positive and she said “No, I will have to sell you to pay for anything you might break! This feels very commercial and touristy. Let’s go, I have to find something.” We left and being away from the shop owner my mom expressed her distaste over how over priced everything was and how most of that stuff could be found in the area in if you took the time to let IT find YOU. She said she didn’t spend much time in the touristy areas during her time there but had fallen in love with a certain place right before she moved back to Phoenix. When the fountain came into our view my mom almost began to glow. We walked over and she sat down where I joined her. She then told me this was the last place she came when leaving and somehow she knew then that she would be coming back. I told her I was sorry that she never got to continue her Sedona life and I wished dad would have never taken her away from Arizona. Very firmly she said “Don’t ever apologize for that!” My eyes got big and then more softly she said something like this “Your dad had all rights to move us and I never fought him on it. I knew when he hit me with that bottle cap and asked me to dance that a new chapter of my life was starting. I had already said goodbye to Sedona and actually was not planning to return. We are here now because through my stories, you have become attached and had never even been here. I knew eventually your wild spirit would find a way to get here and when we hit Flagstaff I decided I WAS TAKING YOU for your first time. We don’t have time to go to vortexes, spiritual epicenters, or areas where I hiked and I am sorry for that. But, you will be back one day and remember us sitting here.”
As I typed that I am crying… I didn’t know how deep she was being at the time because my 18 year old mindset was on what we didn’t have time to do, not the memory she was giving me. I found how she was talking was weird, not foretelling. Plus I REALLY wanted a trinket from that store that was so expensive. In THAT moment I had no clue how many times I would think back and wish I would have been more present for it. Instead I hugged her and thanked her for taking the detour and asked if we could at least get a coffee from somewhere to go back on the road after driving all night, to which she agreed. We got 3 coffees, woke my brother, and continued to Phoenix. That was my one and only time in Sedona and I pretty much wrote it off as a one and done, until now.
Where we are currently boon docking for the winter in our RV I am exactly 210 miles (3 hrs and 58 mins) from the place of magic where my mom found herself as a young woman. Less than a days drive from the fountain where I will visit and relive the memory from that day, with more gratitude than I had in the original moment. I will walk trials she may have walked and feel the spiritual vortex energy she would talk about with glazed over eyes. I will listen for her voice, I will accept her spirit guidance to lead me, I will experience the Sedona the way she did. Being in Arizona feels like I have come home. Like I had to go all the way back to the beginning after a fucked up year in order to start fresh into the next phase of life. It is odd to not have those “adults” physically around anymore to clarify places, memories, and conversations had but Apache Falls proved memories will come very clear if I am meant to remember them. Since that day I am more excited than ever to return to those familiar spots. The ones I didn’t even remember, as was the case with Apache Falls, and the ones that have lived in my soul since I visited, like Sedona. I will honor the sacrifices the adults in my life made at the time to give us experiences many of my friends back home weren’t getting. I will listen for the echos of conversations past and will intuitively tap into the the ancestors that will be standing with me in each spot.
I’m home for now and I will take every opportunity I am able to take, to fully experience whatever the Universe has brought me back to experience. I’m not sure where we will land when we leave in a year, maybe two, but I do know that I will be bringing so much with me to carry me through thanks to the ancestors who have shaped me into the woman behind the blog your reading right now. Thank you for continuing on this journey with me…
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