The birds pecked through the clear wrapping around the plate to eat the cookies. They made quite a mess, birds and cookies. A day later, Abby noticed the plate still sitting on my table. She came by, cleaned up the mess, and took her plate home. She left a note. I don’t know what it said. The wind took her note away down the street.
I know she counts the descansos on her morning runs because she said so once, in her backyard on the phone to a friend. I’m glad she has a friend out there. She must be lonely.
Like Abby, I love New Mexico’s descansos, their permanence along our roads. In other places, memorials of car fatalities feel more temporary. Fragile wooden crosses, flowers, paper notes—all compost or blow away over time. Rocks piled to mark a spot shift, fall, or get reused elsewhere. Descansos are monuments of folk art.
One time in St. Louis I saw the ghost bikes honoring fallen bicyclists, skeletons of bikes painted white. A few years ago, ghost bikes began showing up in New Mexico. Our laws forbid removing descansos from public roadsides. Ghost bikes here have the same protection.
Descansos belong, not to death, but to lives loved, missed, and honored, to families, friends, and communities. Descansos are meant to last through time, storms, the heat of the sun. They’re decorated on birthdays, on holidays, not only on the anniversaries of deaths.
Abby spoke to her phone friend about an AIDS quilt she’d once made for her best friend. She was sad that the full quilt was not on display; it was so large it was shown only in segments.
She spoke of loved ones lost to AIDS and various cancers, of drifting apart from the less-interesting survivors. She felt as temporary as a makeshift cross.
She came to New Mexico eager to make new friends, thinking we were a welcoming people, and she was right. But because of COVID-19 she’s found only isolation.
Sometimes she stands at our mutual, ailing fence, looking at my backyard. So neat, so free of weeds, so cared for.
I want to tell her she isn’t alone, why I don’t answer the door.