Deepbackyard
At the dawn of the pandemic, when I began doing these postcards, I wrote a draft that started with the line, “I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon.”

Down the page I continued, “Maybe the silver lining of the Covid-19 cloud is the chance for us to discover the beauty in our own backyards?”

I was a bit premature on this conclusion, and my colleagues in Europe — locked down before I was in California — thought it was a little tone deaf. We scrapped it, and I wrote something else.

Then the whole world shut down. Then parts reopened. Then closed. Opened. Closed...

Somewhere along the line, Dana and I quit our jobs and sublet our apartment. We got up. Got moving. Got engaged. Got Covid. It wasn’t the best time for a seven month trip around the globe, but it was also kinda the best time. Flights were empty and so was the surf.

As I mentioned last week, it was Dana’s idea to end the trip at the Grand Canyon. She hadn’t seen it, either. We got home, hugged our families, got in the truck and drove south. A roadtrip in our own country was the perfect soft landing and a reminder that, pandemic or not, our backyard has always been world class.

The Grand Canyon is everything you’d expect it to be. Just a bit colder, and with more trees.

It’s nice to be home.

taylor