Two and a half years ago I paid ten bucks to peddle Avon door-to-door. I started writing stories the week I started selling cosmetics. I don't know why. When people ask, I tell them I wanted to remember my strange customers, the women who hid Latin lovers in their closet, the ones who paid me in pennies and pumpkin bread. But the truth was something different, something I still can't articulate. My heart pumped heavy blood, swollen red cells that carried the weight of forty years of memory. I had to unload it.

Somehow, in the telling, in the seven hundred days of pen against paper, feet against pavement, I uncovered something I never knew was hidden. I discovered my fingers were meant to type, my mind was meant to race, this body held snapshot bits of pet and lover and brochure for a reason. I don't know where it's going, just know I'm following a trail of crumbs some invisible force left for me to find.

This is my intro post, my Hi I'm New At BlogHer post, my open hand with a thousand drops of let blood. I will leave you with a short story of a trip I took with my two young boys a few weeks ago, so that you can meet me, meet my family, meet my poverty-stricken rural New Mexico. I will be posting here twice a week with my observations on Life, beginning this Tuesday.

Sanctuary

Two hundred years ago, a Chimayó friar was performing penances when a brilliant light burst from the hillside. He dug into the ground where the light appeared. His hands found a crucifix. The head priest brought the crucifix to a fancy church far away, brought it to be venerated, but three times it disappeared and was later found back in its hole. Then the miraculous healings began, healings associated with the dirt surrounding the artifact.

I told my boys this story as we drove through the quiet mountains west of Las Vegas, told them about the Chimayó chapel, and the way the newly-whole left crutches and before-and-after photographs in thanksgiving.

"Geeze, Mom. You believe that stuff?"

11 spoke with a mouth full of snacks in the backseat. He cocked his head to the left, the way he always does before he explodes in a torrent of intellectual excess.

"According to historical research, there is no evidence that Jesus was divine. In fact, some scientists make the case that he never existed at all."

11 continued, his words some kind of middle-school version of the DaVinci Code. 9 didn't pay attention. He leaned against the car door, a clipboard balanced on his knees, as he drew illustrations of penguins in space.

I didn't answer. I kept my hands on the wheel, let my car slide past one herd of antelope, then another. They raced the wind, thirty, forty, fifty moving as one beast, a mass of delicate antler, of striped flank, of hoof-earth unison.

Chimayó snuck up on us. We fell from the mountains into the desert, with short sun-faded scrub and piles of white sand, fell into a village of a few adobe houses, a shack selling religious trinkets, and the old chapel of miracles. We parked half-a-mile away, under the sparse shade of a mature cottonwood.

We filed inside the chapel, behind an old woman in a wheelchair and her young caregiver. The walls were cracked brown adobe, tired, carrying the energy of a million broken people. Low wooden benches rested in uneven rows. Twenty or so visitors knelt on hard pine kneelers. Catholic saints surrounded us, their peeling fingertips pointing toward Heaven. The boys watched the flicker of a thousand votive candles. I pointed to the famous crucifix, to the hundreds of rags and crutches and photographs piled along the church sides.

11 found the holy dirt site first. A depression sank into the church floor, a child's orange plastic shovel left inside. He bent low, dug into the ground, handed me a shovelful of healing dust. I found a tissue in my purse, opened it, let the dirt collect inside, folded it as carefully as I could. We left.

"Are all those crutches fake? Did people really leave those behind because they were better?"

11's face crunched in an expression of confusion. I could hear his brain cells whirling with information he could not process. 9 shrugged his shoulders, picked up his penguin portrait as I gunned the car engine, one eye on the map. We didn't speak for miles, not until the sunset-hue structures of Santa Fe filled the horizon.

"Mom."

11 leaned close to the back of my head. I could feel his breath on my neck. He sounded on the verge of tears.

"Mom. It seems like everybody believes too much. Those church people don't question things. They just believe it. And maybe scientists don't question things outside of their science either. What's the difference? I don't want to end up believing in nothing."

I opened my mouth to speak, to tell him he's right, that science is a religion sometimes, that people get immersed in their world and forget it's a huge universe, but 9 beat me to it.

"Well if you ask me, they should marry each other. Then they would have kids that can think about both things. Because that's what's real. Both things. But right now all those people are lopsided. Isn't that right, Mom?"

"Yeah. That's exactly it."

11 lay back in his seat. Santa Fe faded behind us with the sun. We pulled off the road at Pecos and watched a lone coyote hunt rabbit. She lifted her head to the twilight stars.

Birdie writes about her life and adventures as an Avon Lady at Beauty Dish.