“Northeast by Southwest” by Susan V. Walton; “When Stars

Collide” by Vienne Felix; and “Nesting Dolls” by Shavawn Midori Berry

Artesia, New Mexico, was just a place on my birth certificate, a fragment of my origin story told by my late parents and surviving cousin. I was there mainly in utero, plus a mere six weeks after birth, before my parents packed us up to return to Chicago and launch into the rest of our lives. It took me three-quarters of a century to spiral back.

Of course, the spiral is a universal symbol, shared by more than Anasazi and Pueblo peoples. Shells and nests evolve in spirals. Clouds, water, and wind unfurl in spirals. Myths echo the spirals of life. Labyrinths invite us to embody them. To find myself pulled into a spiral of return, after decades of Eurocentric life, felt like destiny. I even dreamed that I found a big chunk of peridot winking at me from the spiral stair of a big red London bus. As it turns

I out, peridot is mined in Southern New Mexico. It felt like a clue to a quest.

Visiting from the Northeast just after Election Day, I obtained a state map from the visitors’ center in Santa Fe and was told that oil had been discovered in the Artesia region of New Mexico, and that traffic and prices have surged there. As if on cue, towers and flames of refineries greeted me at the edge of town as I followed Mapquest to the current hospital, just two years old, which had replaced the one I was born in.

The woman in reception at Artesia General, where the New Mexico flag waves beside the Stars and Stripes, wrote down an address for me to find the site of the old hospital, a few blocks away. A crisp new apartment building, Roselawn Manor, now rises where the nuns had been so kind to my lonely English war-bride mother. No vestige of the past remains.

From Roselawn in Artesia, it was a 20-mile drive to Hope, the struggling square-mile village with no railroad and a dried-up river, where my parents chose to settle for a few months until I was born. Yucca plants and Joshua trees line the lonely route.

Details of their stories fade, and I wonder why my parents chose Hope. Did my father’s ambitious plan to show his country to his bride peter out there? Was it the name that drew them? Surely not the now-abandoned general store, or trading post, which my white-collar dad ran for a while, nor the outdoor privy with tarantulas that so terrified my London mum. They had taken in my dad’s big sister and her family from Kansas City for a month, and my older cousin in the Northeast still recalls the thrill of freedom to play in the exotic Southwest.

Twenty-nine years ago, I brought my aging parents and a teenage son to explore New Mexico from a rented 37-foot RV, which I drove along winding roads in four states for two weeks, surprisingly unscathed. We could not risk the heat of a summer detour to Artesia, the septic system required daily interventions from my obliging son, and my dad was periodically disoriented. But we merrily played cards, told stories, and sang as we lumbered in vague spirals through Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, Shiprock, and the Four Corners Monument, into Colorado to Mesa Verde, along the Million Dollar Highway from Durango to Silverton, up to Telluride, and back to Albuquerque through Utah and Arizona. It was an epic journey.

This time by car, I drove south and west in November to find the corrugated metal building labeled “Hope City Hall” with a marmalade cat on patrol outside. The welcoming clerk inside helped me locate the lot my dad used to own. At a tiny crossroads amidst bold cactus, sparse trees resembling acacia, a few trucks and dwellings, not finding much that was tangible, I resolved to continue my quest, returning to Santa Fe via UFO-famous Roswell, with little green men on every corner. Where would my spiral journey lead?

Then, tears, which sprang to my eyes at sunset in Chimayo, the instinct I relied on to navigate on foot in Santa Fe, the pull of the labyrinth at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis, the way my spirit embraced adobe architecture, curving red against blue sky … my jolt at the words and works of Georgia O’Keeffe, herself a seeker from New York … even the affinity I felt for that stubborn cactus in Hope. All felt like a homecoming.

Something whispers, let the spiral work its truth in me, let things evolve and stand, like the miraculous staircase at the Loretto.

but Santa Fe was not an easy place to develop a career in entertainment. Felix, widely known by a single name (like Cher and Fabian), had been seduced by nightly standing ovations for his olio act during a long-ago Fiesta Melodrama. He studied and auditioned for several years, having more success with poorly paying stage work than career-level film roles. Adventurous and committed, he managed to stay on the periphery of the entertainment industry for decades.

One evening Felix found himself schmoozing with some film buffs at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame. When he called home that evening, he sounded distressed. “Hey,” he began with slightly tipsy contempt, “have you ever heard of an actor named Val De Vargas?”

I was suddenly 16. “Valentine De Vargas?!” I hadn’t heard the name, well, ever. He was a secret entity in my personal fandom that only I knew. No one else had ever said the sacred name aloud to me. “Ha ... Ha ... Hatari Valentine De Vargas?” I stammered.

Valentine De Vargas?” There was grave disappointment in Felix’s voice. “You’ve heard of him?”

“Yes! He’s a wonderful actor!” I continued breathlessly. “He made movies with John Wayne and Eli Wallach.”

“Really?” Felix replied through his teeth. “I thought he was just a big-mouth, making up stories about his great acting career. I never heard of him. You want to meet him?”

I was shaking.

I think it took me three minutes to drive three miles into town. By the time I got to Cowgirl, Felix had made nice with Val, a tall, still-handsome devil with a booming voice and a stunning, confident presence. How could this man not be a major star? Val loved the awe in my eyes. Felix, not so much.

We talked about Val’s humble beginnings in Las Vegas, New Mexico. He had gone to California to study law, but his uncle, a talent agent out there, got him a small part in It was his own kind of olio act success, so he changed his name from Albert Schubert to Valentine De Vargas to get bad-guy roles in TV Westerns. Orson Welles allowed him to use all his talents in (in which he carried the title role opposite Janet Leigh and Charlton Heston), but his lines had been cut from and many other films because his commanding voice tended to upstage the stars. He returned to Santa Fe and only worked occasionally as an actor after the ’60s. He was a local real estate agent.

My husband did not hesitate to accept an invitation to come to Val’s home for dinner during the winter holidays. It was a modest house, actually owned by Val’s charming girlfriend at the time, in the same westside neighborhood where Felix had grown up. We brought a friend of ours who also remembered Val, an elderly, former casting director who said he tried and tried to persuade Jerome Robbins to let Val play Bernardo in but Robbins was determined to find a ballet dancer for the part. Over supper, we all agreed that Val would have been great in the role, though he would have seemed a foot taller than anyone else in the cast.

As we all drank and became more sociable, Felix began to tell his funny stories about growing up in Santa Fe. Val could not help but interrupt. He, too, was accustomed to dominating the room. The casting director and I began whipping our heads back and forth like we were watching a tennis match.

Val had a loud voice. Felix had a loud voice, too. And, as they became more competitive, they both used their trained stage voices to “carry to the back of the room.” Sensitive to loud noises, I went there. They obliviously entertained one another until they were both hoarse. I gave Val the edge, though it was close.

We didn’t see Val very often after that, as it happened, though we always thought of him as a friend and greeted him warmly when we found him around town. He never forgot that I was a longtime fan. Not one to blend in in public places, he was in line at Subway the last time I saw him. He was still striking and friendly. I gave him a hug and tried to say he was looking good, but he wasn’t. His new mate whispered that he was terminally ill.

He passed away at an out-of-state hospital later that year. There was no obituary in and no memorial at the Academy Awards. As big as he was, in stature, personality, and my heart, he was too small or, really, too loud to be famous.

is of your mom taking care of her mom at the end of her life.

Nana had Stage IV breast cancer for 14 years. She passed just after your fourth birthday. The morning she died, you remember playing with your twoyear-old brother, Kelly, toys splayed out on the red cotton rug in her living room. You remember how quiet the house was. All the sudden. Hush. Hush. The sound of your breath and the sink dripping. And then, your mother crying. “Momma. Momma, wake up. Momma. Please wake up.”

You realize you are now in the role of caregiver. Your mother has become her mother.

The wheel of time has spun for 55 seasons, and you are occupying yourself as she once occupied herself. A pattern, a spiral, turns and turns. You are back where your first memories began. You realize the egg your father fertilized in the summer of 1959 already existed within your mother when she was in utero in 1934. You realize this pattern stretches back in time until you lose the thread of your family’s history. Some molecule of what became you existed inside Nana when she was growing in the womb of your great-grandmother in 1901. Some tiny bit of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, or starlight that was a part of you, was there.

You think about the Fibonacci sequence and see the pattern of it in your genes, in the strands of DNA passed down to you since humans walked out of the primordial soup. Some part of you stood under the baobab trees on the African continent as the Earth shifted and spun. All the people you came from are connected to Laniakea, a supercluster holding the

I

Milky Way in its arms, glowing with long strands of light that look like wings.

This circle, this ribbon of life and death and life and death, unspools in front of you. Each cell that allows you to grow or heal looks like a spiral with light cells at each end. That light in you — that light in your mother and her mother and her mother’s mother — connects you.

You sit at the kitchen table with your mom. She’s wearing a blanket as a cape, shivering as she cups her hands around a hot cup of tea.

The Christmas tree is festooned with lights — stars, orbs, tiny brilliant blue lights — and ornaments she’s given you over the years. Each one evokes a time in your life, a flood of memories from years you lived thousands of miles away from her, and unwrapped home when you opened a gift of a sock monkey, an angel with a sand pail at the beach, or a glass deer.

“Look,” she says, pointing to the headline, “You Really Should Walk Your Cat,” in the

“Yeah, I saw that,” you say, laughing. She steers you to the student loan forgiveness piece and a political cartoon.

You often find her drifting in and out of sleep, sitting in her green BarcaLounger, the upholstery snagged by cats. Her energy wanes quickly. Her appetite is small. She has trouble reading. As she sips her tea in the quiet, you are hyper-aware of the passage of time.

“Ambiguous grief,” your doctor says. You’ve put on 12 pounds since the summer. Your blood work is bad; your sleep, interrupted.

“What’s that?” “Grieving a person who’s still living. When you’re dealing with someone with a terminal or chronic illness or with Alzheimer’s, or something that alters their behavior, it puts you into a state of chronic, ambiguous grief.” Yes. You gulp the air. Each day your mother disappears a little bit more. The doctor prescribes sunlight, walking, vitamins, and talk therapy.

“You need someone to care for you.”

According to Science, we are all made up of dead stars. The chemical composition in our bodies is the same.

You are nothing but dead stars and water. You feel the rush of Puget Sound passing over you as you swim, deeper and deeper.

That morning five and a half decades ago at Nana’s is still seared into your skin, your brain, your marrow.

You saw her rise and walk out of the house. You felt her birdlike hand on your shoulder as they loaded her corpse into the ambulance.

She burned you with her love for words. She filled you with a longing for more.

You are a nesting doll. Inside you, your mother. Inside her, her mother. Inside Nana, little mother. And each one gets smaller as you trace your line. You’re the last one. There’ll be no daughter to care for you.