We often travel for Christmas. Usually we are making our ways to familiar places, with familiar smells and sites and sounds. But often these places have been made strange by long absences. They are newer and older with each visit. It is a relief to heave the last large bag from the trunk of my parents' old new car and inhale a deep gulp of air that breathes of being sixteen years old. I am comforted by knowing so keenly where I am. Moments later though, the warm feeling is displaced by the unwelcomed awareness of the distance between myself and the memories kindled.

Photos taken by my father, a New Mexican by birth, wandering The Land of Enchantment during a visit to his mother on a recent frosty morning.