Tucked in the back of my journal is a notecard with this image by Gustave Baumann. I went on a hunt during my recent visit to Santa Fe in hopes that I could still find his work in the museum gift shop I had visited several years prior. Three small pieces once hung in the old Ohio farmhouse: a modest display, but one that transported my memory back to the Southwest with only a passing glance. In the dissolution, I surrendered nearly everything; except an antique double-sided architect desk, a mattress, art & camera supplies, my car, and two original pieces of art created by people very special to me. Anything else that I am left with today are the leftovers from my former husband which he had intended to discard or donate to charity. But those three pieces were special to him as well.
As luck would have it, years later, Baumann’s work was still lingering on store shelves. “Ah, permanent collection!” I thought to myself. I’m sure whoever manned the front desk that day probably wondered why some lady rushed straight to the gift shop without ever making her way around the halls of the museum (the parking meter a few blocks away was running low on time). I only found one of the exact images that I had once possessed. I held it close to my chest for a few minutes like an old friend as I scanned the other racks for its missing partners. And then, I decidedly put it back on the shelf.
At that moment I realized I was holding on to the past out of a sense of blind preservation, rather than re-evaluating everything that shifted within myself since that time. I was so preoccupied with finding an exact replica that my eyes passed over every single image that was not cemented in my memory. I stopped myself. I searched with new eyes. I experienced Baumann’s work again. And, wouldn’t you know, everything changed.
I left with a card of Arroyo Chamisa, drawn in by the deep blue sky and a salmon foreground which reminded me how I had first been taken aback by the blushing landscape of northern New Mexico. I found something that felt both new and familiar, small enough to slip between pages as I lived on the road for another two weeks, but special enough to fill that small, vacant, internal space.
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