I’m parked in Denver now, at the Sapp Bros. Food & Fuel off exit 278. That’s I70, the mainline, the I I know so well. Getting here, coming north on 287, it would have been so easy to turn west at Lamar onto 50. Or turn west in the middle of eastern Colorado sagebrush country onto 94. Or take 24 out of Limon.

Is it that, apologies to the Romans, all roads lead to Colorado Springs?

Or that when you’re homesick, every road is a potential path back home?

Not that it isn’t rather nice, driving around in my own truck. For the first time in two and a half months, for example, I have been able to unpack my bags. My Spartan kit is distributed among various compartments throughout the truck, a huge convenience as compared with the previous system. The upper bunk is folded up out of the way. This means I can actually sit up straight in the lower one or even, should I have a mind to do so, stand up and stretch. No longer is the light from the sleeper lights and sleeper windows blocked. It would not be an exaggeration to say there is even a sort of airiness about the place. A cozy sort of airiness.

It’s just that I will have lots of time to enjoy these palatial, relatively speaking, digs in the foreseeable future and very little time, in that foreseeable future, to enjoy the truly spacious ones sixty miles south of where I presently sit.

They’re so well situated, too, those spacious digs. So close to the mountains, to the people I know. Within its walls is a cat, my library, a motorcycle, a woodshop in which I would love knuckle down and get to work and build something. Crossing over America’s rivers so much lately, I keep thinking about building a canoe. A lot of work, that. Realistically, I will never find the time as long as I’m driving over the road. Realistically, I’ll never find the time to paddle it, either.

So many things to do at home, including getting this rolling broom closet truly set up for long-term occupation; a project that will include parting together a bicycle I can mount to the back of the cab.

I also need to have another chat with my agent, see what she’s been doing towards getting The Great American Desert into the hands of potential publishers. And gathering up the materials for the next book, the one that has been gathering dust these two and a half months, so that I can finish it out here on the road.

And put the house and landscape back in something resembling order, go for some hikes, see my friends and drink Scotch and sangria with them, eat some real food, give some lessons to my dance student and my writing student, maybe even make a batch of gooseberry marmalade with the gooseberries I hurriedly gathered the last time I was briefly home.

Before I can do any of that I need to try to get a few hours of sleep so I can get up to mosey down to my 3AM delivery, after which I can get rolling down I25 and find a place to park my rig for my very busy week of relaxation.