It takes everything.

[fortune cookie]

To to the person who will someday spread my ashes:

I hope I lived a long and healthy life, and that you are a granddaughter or grandson, or preferably a great-granddaughter or grandson, and I hope I made it obvious to you that I loved you with all my heart. Thank you for humoring a dead woman.

It needs to be fall, the very beginning of October, and your first stop is West Texas.

Head downtown and walk into the haunted, glory-ridden rickety J. Wilde's building. I don't know what boutique or restaurant or other life this building will be living when you step into it, but the first time I walked into that building at fourteen years old it was pure magic to me. It was a cross between a church and a cave and an artist's den. I was consumed with a feeling of full-throated lust, too intense and deep to be directed at any man or woman. It was a longing for a version of life itself.

I smelled the slightly musty old-building air and gazed at the altar in the center of the room, dust motes circling in the air, and chills ran down the backs of my thighs and all I could think was I want, I want. When I worked there years later in college, dead women would walk in the gap-floored former bordello upstairs when it was closing time and I knew for a fact no one else was in the building but me.

On days when the store was empty I would sit on the counter and make lists of every single thing I dreamed of, every single thing I wanted. For some reason, this was the first place that made me look forward to life. I hope you find many places like this on your own journey. Tilt a little part of me into a small jar and hide it somewhere. Try not to violate any health codes.

Tip a little out at the Chicken Farm Art Center into the bathtub with all the animal bones in it.

The next dab of ashes should be at Rosa's Tortilla Factory. Just a little, put 'em anywhere, either location is okay. Grab some tortillas for the road, and good God, stop judging me, I'm your grandmother and I'm already dead.

Next, drive down the beautiful, tree-lined streets of Santa Rita to my parent's old backyard, let yourself in the back, tilt some into your palm and blow them across the grass. I stood in that backyard when I was twenty-seven and about to leave for the very last time in my tumultuous twenties.

I felt the breeze against my back and felt the dogs lean against my calves and felt a specific kind of terror that it really was time for me to try and figure out how to build a home of my own somewhere. I could not imagine finding the happiness that I'd had here anywhere else. I stood there for a long time and thought about how some of the most important work of my life would be to build a home that brought the same joy to others that their home had brought to me.

Your next stop is Flagstaff, Arizona. When you are driving on a flat plain for what feels like surely a hundred years and your bladder is about to burst and then finally, finally the air starts to cool and you begin to rise, put on some Joshua Radin and roll down your window and smell the pine trees and hold a fist of ashes out in the night air (it has to be night) and feel my ghost shriek with delight as she flies alongside you in the dark.

Almost every time I drove over that stretch of earth I was with my sister, we were listening to Joshua Radin, and we were at the end of a twelve-hour road trip and really had to pee, shrieking with laughter over how ohmyGod this time we were really going to wet ourselves in the car because there is absolutely nowhere to stop until you are in the city.

While you're there, leave a pinch of me at Buffalo Park and a pinch of me downtown, in the stretch of street between the bank and the Old Town Shops on Leroux Street, where my sister and I walked all those years ago during our first night in Flag, thrilled to be twenty-something and living somewhere we loved, where a young man turned around as we whirled by and said, You are both absolutely beautiful.

But don't stay too long. Colorado is far and you need to be there by morning, because there is nothing as beautiful as Colorado on a fall morning. Stop in Trinidad, the border town just over the line from New Mexico, where I swear my alternate universe self lives and slams tequila in shot glasses she throws herself (just kidding, she really drinks tea in her underwear and avoids bars like the plague- not even my alternate universe self is cool). I always wanted to live here but the stars never aligned, until now. Let a pinch of me go in the predawn still.

Keep going north, north, north until you're in Boulder, then keep going until you are in Longmont, its far less fashionable sister city. Here, I can't tell you exactly where to let the next handful of ashes go, since I can't decide. What was it that I loved about Longmont? It was everything. If you can't decide either, walk to the house on the corner of Terry and 6th, stand on the porch, and filter part of me into the flower garden beneath you, if there is still a flower garden blooming there. An old veteran tended the bright blooms there a lifetime ago.

Sit by the river for a while. Not for me, but for you.

Next, turn west, further west, until you come to the jagged line where the sea begins. You're in California and it is not warm, because I was never wise enough to go to the warm places in California, only the cold foggy snowy ones. Start in the Bay area and don't park anywhere lest they take every dime you have and cut your trip short, dooming you to be haunted by me for eternity.

Keep going up, the ocean at your left, until you drive by Green String Farm on Old Adobe Road, just outside the town of Petaluma, as sweet as it sounds. Here it gets specific. Pull over at the farm store. Turn on Sandalwood by Lisa Loeb, walk out to the patch of sunflowers by the goat shed, and fling a handful of my ashes victoriously in the air and shout She finally figured out how to grow Brussels sprouts! And she hated kale the whole time she lived here! Ignore the astonished expressions from any hipster farm interns munching on raw lentils nearby. Then turn back, get in the car, play "That Dress Looks Nice On You" by Sufjan Stevens, and keep going north. If the goats dance on my new grave, that is by prior arrangement. Don't turn back.

There is a summer camp in the Sierra national forest. There is a really big rock there in the center of the camp. On the very top of it, I burned a letter from a boy or man that I had carried with me for two years. In it, he called me beautiful, something no boy or man had ever called me before, and for some important inexplicable reason I climbed to the top of this rock when I was twenty-four and burned it to ash. I'd like part of me to keep it company now.

Keep winding north. I understand if you have to take I-5 for time purposes, but if you're in between jobs or lives and have time to spend, take the 101 up the coast. Camp if you can. My favorite spot is a touch north of Mendocino. An old couple tape an envelope to the front of the general store every night and turn in early. You can just stick cash in the envelope.

When you cross the border into Oregon, get out of your car and let your dog take a pee break. (You do have a dog with you, right?) My urn is probably running on fumes now, but smear a little piece of my at the base of the nearest redwood. They're not as tall and breathtaking as the ones in California, but I prefer an understated redwood.

Keep going. See the sea lions, hike in the trees, hop naked into Bagby Springs. Keep winding north and you will end up in a small town north of Salem, south of Portland. My ashes are long gone by now, I know. Sorry for all the stops. Pick up the urn they were in and dig a small hole in the stand of trees just north outside of town. Bury whatever's left and tamp down the dirt. If in fact I am not in an urn, but in a tasteful repurposed resealable sunflower seed bag or something similar, you can just recycle it. It's okay. It's all going to be a part of the sun one day anyway.

When you're ready, you can go home. If you don't have one, then you've seen all of mine. You're welcome to give one of them a try. Happy trails,

Your doting great-great-great grandmother