A love letter to Laredo

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It was my mother who taught me to love Laredo. From Mexico City, my mother said she loved Laredo because in Laredo she felt like somebody. She said that here she was not one of millions. Here, she was Mrs. Frank, a businesswoman, mother of four daughters, well known, and admired. Like her love of dancing, she felt that in Laredo her energy and efforts were reciprocated, and she reminded me always, “En este mundo, nada mas dejas un buen hacer.”

I came back to live in Laredo 24 years ago with my husband, Frank, whom I met in NYC at architecture school.

Sincerely, L. Cohen

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The dusk sky is awash in a furious, persistent orange blaze to the west. Its lesser glows of apricot and rose catch on the metal roofs, gates, and fence posts of the house pasture. The spectacle is a glory that charges irrepressibly by rote to remind me how much a part I am of this wild landscape and it a part of me. The stillness of the hour and the pungency of damp earth conjure a powerful nostalgia for the first days I came to this ranch in retreat from a broken heart and ruptured finances. When I take that long look back, I understand that my life in Austin and Wimberley, even as a 40-year-old, was a protracted interlude in Never Never Land.