Tomorrow, early morning, I’ll head to Logan Airport in Boston with JP. We’re flying to Denver, where we’ll spend one night before driving down to New Mexico for a couple of days. Then we’ll turn around and drive back again for the annual AWP Writer’s Conference.
Here’s the scary part — I’m not bringing my laptop. There will be no pulling it out of the laptop case before sending it through airport security and then hurriedly zipping it back inside before lugging it to the gate. I really want to “unplug” for seven straight days and see how that feels. I feel like I need the time away. Well, “unplug” is a relative term, because I do have an iPhone, so I will be able to check my email. But I hope not to do that too often, and any responses I send will have to be brief, because they’ll be typed on the iPhone’s tiny little touch-screen keyboard.
Usually I take my laptop with me everywhere I go. This time, instead, I’m bringing my new writing notebook, the purple hard-cover one I described in my last post, below. After just a few days, I’m becoming pretty attached to that notebook. Yesterday, when the sun finally came out over Boston after days and days of rain, I relaxed in a lounge chair on our back deck and wrote for about an hour and a half in that notebook. I’m hoping next week I’ll fill it with images from Colorado (where I used to live) and New Mexico (which I love) and the thoughts those images will inspire. Hopefully, I’ll eventually shape a few essays out of whatever comes to mind.
So, here I go. I’m heading out to Colorado, to the big blue sky, to the jagged, majestic Rocky Mountain views I miss so much, and to the dusty roads of New Mexico — sans computer, sans laptop.
It’s a brave new (old?) world.
