Member-only story
Dateline: Tucumcari
A woman, her dog, and the open road.
Sunday, shortly before noon, my dog Clooney and I got into a rented van packed with an assortment of things deemed “fragile” or “important” and began our westward trek from Durham, North Carolina, to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
We had come to North Carolina at the end of April for a final two weeks of moving and packing that are part of a complicated multi-part move. My family and I were preparing for what comes next, and it has been a lot of work to sort through the bazillion things we have managed to collect since July of 2006, the date we moved into a rather large house which had lots of empty space which we proceeded to fill.
Our day of reckoning has reverberated for a little over a year now, but what remains of our things after multiple rounds of purging are now packed up and headed west; so my dog and I did the same.
Last August when my dog made his first cross continental trip, he was a dreadful traveler.
He panted and slobbered profusely. He refused to eat. I became that woman in front of you at the drive through at McDonald’s getting her dog a plain hamburger and a cup of water who then inconveniently forgot to pull forward while tearing the hamburger into bite-sized pieces for her dog.
