I forget why I jotted this note down precisely.
Most of the time an annotated passage takes me straight back to my thoughts when originally reading it…
But I’m blank.
Outside of the mountains, this scene does not sound different than it is in Lubbock.
On a dry year the baked cotton fields begin to blow as the summer wears on.
The dry morning air turns into feeling like a hair dryer as the wind picks up and the afternoon heat begins.
By dinnertime there is a sand storm and half of West Texas is in the air and on the move.
From my desert plateau, I could see our house, just beyond the city limits, at the base of the Cerbat Mountains, amid red-rock desert speckled with mesquite, tumbleweeds, and paddle-shaped cacti. Out here, dust devils swirled up from nothing, blurring your vision, then disappeared. Spaces stretched on, then fell away into the distance.
-Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (Amazon)
It sounds like Saudi Arabia too though.
It sounds like home.