A New Friend, Italian Food and the Sublime James McMurtry

An almost-full moon rising over the hills outside Paonia, Colorado.

So part of my strategy for dealing with the endless waiting associated with IVF is to plan some fun things vs spending all my time moping around the house. Last night, as part of that, we went to Hotchkiss and Paonia.

Hotchkiss was to visit with a new fried of ours (a lovely woman my husband met in film class last semester)...she lives in a little cottage with a view of mountains and sky, a wooden fence carved out in twigs and birds, a huge screened-in porch out back and a tiny cabin on the other side of a lush green lawn that if I lived there I'd turn into a writing studio. Plus the whole house is furnished with one-of-a-kind vintage everything, photographs, the picture she's currently painting on a easel...she had snacks for us and glasses of wine for my husband and it was lovely to be in her presence.

After, we drove the short distance to Paonia, which is a little hippie town at the base of the mountains that go up to Aspen. We had Italian food in an outdoor garden with hollyhocks and a burbling fountain, nicoise olives as dusk fell and then we went to the tiny Paradise Theater to see James McMurtry, whose music I've loved since I spent a couple years in Austin, Texas back in the '90s. He was at his best when it was just him and his red acoustic guitar, singing "Ruby and Carlos"...the whole place was just spellbound:

"Holding back the flood, just don't do no good

You can't unclench your teeth, to howl the way you should

So curl your lips around the taste of tears and hollow sounds

Than no one owns but you, no one owns but you."

There's so much pain in the world.

And so much beauty, too.