TX- Missions Completed

You may recall way back in Big Texas, when we were derailed in our quest to visit the missions. Well, just so you know we're not a bunch of quitters, here is some proof that we made it. It was stunning. The fact that such beautiful and enduring architecture and art was so painstakingly crafted out of the wild and isolating Nothing is amazing. I admire the incredible gumption and effort that it took to make these missions and to orchestrate their many functions. They were churches but also farms, ranches, schools; really whole villages, where priests oversaw the everyday lives of scores of Native Americans who did all their living and dying there. I appreciate much of the ideology of those early Franciscans, and I can see how one might have felt pride and purpose, looking out from the tower at the people they had helped to be fed, literate, sheltered, and saved in many ways. Of course I also know that not all those residents wanted that kind of saving, or were there voluntarily. I know that ideology wasn't necessarily reality, and that these missions were the beginning of the end of entire cultures. That they ended up falling apart across the street from Lou's Bar and Circle K.

For me, a Catholic and the great-granddaughter of a Native American, this is a part of my cultural heritage. It's hard to know just what to make of it. But I love going places that remind me to consider it. And I love that in those spots, I can walk around and know that feet have turned up the earth there for hundreds of years. I like watching Little One run in the open spots and walk with Her grandmother, picking up rocks and tracing in the dust, and know that children have been playing the same way, in that same spot, for centuries. I like to imagine them and what they became; children who have grown and died and whose grandchildren have lived and gone, who once pressed their little hands to those same stone bricks. They were smoother then.

I like to wonder who will follow after us.


I also like to wonder what the old family who lived in this spot would have thought, if they could see it today. I imagine they would think,
"what the heywire is a Coke machine doing in my house?"