{"id":2198453,"date":"2025-12-14T10:14:19","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T10:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2198453"},"modified":"2025-12-14T10:14:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T10:14:19","slug":"the-geography-of-grief-from-louisiana-across-texas-risher-entertainment-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/the-geography-of-grief-from-louisiana-across-texas-risher-entertainment-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The geography of grief, from Louisiana across Texas: Risher | Entertainment\/Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Long road trips are good for my soul for reasons I don’t fully understand.<\/p>\n

Last week, my husband and I left Louisiana to head to El Paso, on the far western edge of Texas. With all the hubbub of flying, airports and missed connections, we decided to drive.<\/p>\n

Driving all the way across Texas takes time. Watching the sometimes gradual and sometimes sudden changes of landscape helps me connect the dots between more than places on a map.<\/p>\n

We’ve made the long drive from Louisiana to El Paso several times. When we’re heading west, I appreciate the way the skies get bigger and the horizon broadens. Expansive horizons make me calmer \u2014 like the world isn’t quite as hectic as it was when everything was crowding in.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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On this particular road trip, my husband and I were driving toward a funeral for our beloved nephew. There was something cathartic in taking so long to get to El Paso \u2014 in watching the trees, landscapes and even the food shift along the way.<\/p>\n

Maybe putting distance between everyday life and responsibilities helped, too. But maybe a road trip also helps create a more balanced perspective, as poet David Whyte describes when he writes about horizons<\/a>:\u00a0“Horizons between the known and the unknown are everywhere in our human lives, even when we refuse to lift our heads and our eyes to see them\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lifting my own eyes to see the sun \u2014 or even shielding them from the late-afternoon, low-hanging winter sun \u2014 gave me time to contemplate the known and unknown, especially the mysteries of grief.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In looking back at the trip, East Texas was still full of green and noise, like the chaos of the early days of grief.<\/p>\n

West Texas was spare, honest and uncluttered. It reminded me of the way grief can strip life down to the barest of bones. You can\u2019t hurry West Texas, just like you can\u2019t hurry grief.<\/p>\n

When we hit the mountains near El Paso, I felt like we were climbing to say goodbye.<\/p>\n

We took our time to get to El Paso. We turned what could have been a brutal one-day haul into three gentle days \u2014 visiting with people we love and staying in surprising places along the way.<\/p>\n

We stopped in Big Spring, Texas,\u00a0a place we had never been \u2014 a dusty, overlooked town to many \u2014 but there we found a hotel with rooms as gorgeous as any I\u2019ve ever seen. The Settles Hotel surprised me. It was like this little oasis of comfort and care.\u00a0In the middle of a hard trip, that unexpected beauty felt like a kindness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A room with a view at The Settles Hotel in Big Spring, Texas<\/p>\n

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\n BY JAN RISHER | Staff writer<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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So much of my adult life has been about proving that places that aren\u2019t big, fancy cities can still be wonderful, and The Settles Hotel is evidence of that.<\/p>\n

Looking out from our 10th-floor room in Big Spring gave me more time to consider horizons and be grateful for the chance to be there \u2014 and for the time and distance between where we were and where we\u2019d been.<\/p>\n

While I appreciate the wonder that is air travel, flying can be so jarring in the sense of walking into one place and stepping out somewhere completely different. Driving across the whole of Texas is the opposite of that.<\/p>\n

Road trips are so good for my heart, mind and spirit. Every time, they remind me that we are small and the world is still vast.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I don\u2019t know exactly why road trips help with healing, but this one did.<\/p>\n

The miles gave our grief someplace to stretch its legs\u00a0\u2014 and gave us a broader horizon to bear it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nola.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Long road trips are good for my soul for reasons I don’t fully understand. Last week, my husband and I left Louisiana to head to El Paso, on the far western edge of Texas. With all the hubbub of flying, airports and missed connections, we decided to drive. Driving all the way across Texas takes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2198454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[128321],"class_list":["post-2198453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-hardwall"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/The-geography-of-grief-from-Louisiana-across-Texas-Risher.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2198453"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2198455,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2198453\/revisions\/2198455"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2198454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2198453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2198453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2198453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}