“What is New Mexico like?” I receive this question almost every time I introduce myself. “I’ve never met someone from New Mexico!”, “Is it hot there?”, “Is it like Arizona?”, and “Where? Mexico?”, are all statements and questions that follow. Most simply, I usually tell people that, yes, it does have all four seasons, and, no, it’s not really like Breaking Bad. I tell them that it has mountains if you like hiking and camping, and I’ve lived there my whole life. I love it.

If I had the time and their attention, I would tell them that I grew up using those mountains to tell which direction home was, and that they are called the Sandia mountains because of the peony pink color they glow at sunset. I miss how they guard the city and my home when I’m away. I have spent summers sleeping in those mountains near fires and looking up at stars with my family and friends cocooned in sleeping bags, and winters learning what it feels like to fly down their snowy white edges. I have spent every last evening before leaving for college looking over the city lights from their sturdy base and the bed of a truck. 

What is New Mexico like? New Mexico is its year-round clear blue skies that fill with a kaleidoscope of hot air balloons in the fall. They float on the “Albuquerque Box” of wind that makes it perfect for them to drift away. The wind creates a top and bottom that carries them up and away, and then always back home. They fill the sky, and the city comes together to watch them glow, rise, and eat from the booths and vendors that line the festival edges.

To me, New Mexico is Corrales, the small part of New Mexico just outside the city where I grew up. Corrales used to be small but is now filled with American Paint and Apaloosa horses that laze in the sun at the stables dotted between cafes, traditional adobe homes, and wooden vigas that hold up tiny shops sitting on the side of the road I biked with my best friends as a kid. Even though it has grown, I can still tell you my favorite places to have breakfast, the places where I have my best and worst memories, and name the roads off like the alphabet, but I didn’t learn their sound in a classroom; I learned their names through scraped knees and fresh breeze. The roads I know so well lead to the red courts I learned to play tennis on with my family during hot summer days before I was old enough to focus on anything but the taunting noises of the cold pool next door. The roads lead to yellow monkey bars that blistered my hands in elementary school, my best friend’s house, where I learned to cartwheel and handstand in middle school, the Bosque paths I have run countless miles on since, and the trees in my backyard that I climbed until I was afraid to go any higher. New Mexico is the metal gate to my house that arches to form the curves and bends that mean “You’re home.” New Mexico is the sound of my dogs barking in the backyard at skunks, porcupines, and other dogs. It is the constant music playing in my kitchen, the yellow glass fruit bowl on the counter, the warmth from the stove, and my mother and father’s hands wrapping, cutting, and mixing. The smell of roasting chile, and the question “red or green?” at every meal. New Mexico is the fifteen generations of my family that lived in the “Land of Enchantment” before me, creating the tradition, heritage, and community that I feel when I’m away.

What is New Mexico like? New Mexico feels like family and childhood; it feels like the joy of being home and the melancholy of leaving, but it also feels like growing up. Just like a living, breathing creature, New Mexico has grown up with me. It has grown houses, met new people, and endured drought and floods. It has new shops and new people moving in, and although I wish it could stay frozen in time like when I was a child, I, too, have grown taller, met friends that have turned into family, and pushed past countless challenges. Just like the balloons that light up it’s sky in the fall, I also have wandered away, but always find my way home. New Mexico has grown up with me.

So to answer the question, “What is New Mexico like?” my answer is that New Mexico is my sisters, my brother, my mom, and my dad. It is my grandparents, green chile, and my dogs. It is adobe walls, my home, roads and playgrounds, tennis courts and horses, it is music, mountains, and the sun. It is the place where I grew into who I am today. New Mexico is home.