The Most Beautiful Place

The Most Beautiful Place on Earth

My mother, Lorene (Clayton) Wold, who had traveled widely in her life, left her body in a little adobe casita in Taos, New Mexico just a few miles from the old village of Las Vegas, New Mexico where she had lived as a child. She was born not so far away in Artesia, New Mexico.

A week before her spirit left the body, I drove her north out of Taos to our favorite roadside Mexican food stand where we bought our preferred picnic lunch: chili beans and tacos “to go”. Than I drove off the main highway down the little road that follows the stream flowing out of Taos Ski Valley toward the gorge through which the Rio Grande flows in that part of it’s journey to the Gulf of Mexico.

Mom always loved to be riding but that day, for the first time, was too weak to look at the passing scenery with her usual alert interest.

I parked at a wide spot in the road just where the Taos Ski Valley stream descends into the Rio Grande Gorge,. We got out and I threw down a blanket beside the stream where we could sit to eat our lunch. After the meal, Mom rested on the blanket while I explored the stream bank. The little stream was running clear and cold from snow melt in the mountains. On the other side of the road from the stream was a small irrigation ditch. Wild cress waved in its transparent water. Dilapidated barbwire fences bordered the dry alfalfa fields on both sides of the road– fields that would be bright green in the summer but which were brown and dead now. Westward, toward the Rio Grande gorge, an outcropping of black basalt formed a typical low mesa decorated at the top with a couple of adobe shacks. Eastward, in the distance, loomed the pale blue Taos Mountains.

Returning from my walk, I watched beside my sleeping mother for a while. The gentle wind stirred her short gray hair. After a few minutes she sat up, looked around and said, “This is the most beautiful place on earth.”

A few days later, I scattered her ashes there.

Tomasito, 2008

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