Peregrination n. 1. travel from one place to another, especially on foot. 2. a course of travel; journey. A traveling abroad.
From the time I was six years old, my family became peregrinators, traveling from one country to the next while my father worked for an international company with refineries around the world. My mother never dreamed when she married our father in 1940 that their life together would take them to the jungles of Colombia; Bombay, India; Manila, Philippines; Melbourne, Australia; Tokyo, Japan; and finally Paris, France with forays to the Middle East and Africa. During that time, she raised us and our brother (d. 1962), managed a household, entertained visitors, local politicians and business people as well as members of the United States government, while providing an example of a steel magnolia with a gentle, kind core.
By my early twenties, I was ready to leave my family and to move on. I did, by completing an undergraduate degree in Community Work and a graduate diploma in Business Administration both from Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts; marrying a fellow who moved us to the Southwest where he, with a recently earned doctorate, began his career in astrophysics at the University of Arizona; and where we bought a house and brought two very precious children into the world who are now adults.
Although I have lived in four different houses following the time we arrived here, have divorced (twice), and remarried again, I've been amazed to occasionally realize that I've spent more than two-thirds of my life in one place after moving about every two to three years for the first third.
Peregrinating is in my blood, and since I have fallen in love with the Desert Southwest, I have chosen to run and hike long distances (among other activities) and to travel on this continent and abroad when the offered the opportunity or when I want to visit two of my three (now adult) children and their families on the east coast.
This blog is a reflection of not only my love of the Desert Southwest, but also of other places. My first journey, chosen as I approached the age of seventy, was to join a friend and to travel to England where my mother and my father have roots from generations ago. I walked coast to coast across England, actually, and prepared for that adventure by walking/hiking a lot here in the Southwest. I have since hiked parts of the Camino de Santiago in Spain and next hope to hike trails in Switzerland.
