Fire

The smoke obscures the mountains and forms a cloud above them.

Living all those years on the east coast, I had no idea what wildfires in the West might be like. Right now we have one burning that is the biggest (area-wise) in New Mexico history. It has scorched almost 300 square miles of the Gila National Forest, and is 0% contained. If that seems unbelievable, there are a couple things you need to know.
That loveable Smoky the Bear was invented before it was recognized that the forest needs to purge itself of dead wood and other detritus on the forest floor once in a while; mother nature provides lightning to ignite the dry tinder and burn it up. The huge fire is named Whitewater-Baldy; it has a hyphenated name because it is the marriage of two fires, each started by lightning. It has had minimal effects on human habitation; so far there are twelve summer homes and some outbuildings that have burned, the Catwalk recreation area at Glenwood is closed and the town of Mogollon is under an evacuation notice (Mogollon is an old mining town, now a tourist-attraction ghost town, with only a few permanent residents).
Containment of the fires when they first got going about two weeks ago would have been impossible as well as unwise. The area is largely wilderness without roads; the rugged terrain and high winds kept out firefighting equipment of any kind. As the fires have gotten closer to forest roads and settlements and the wind has died down, air tankers and helicopters are being used, and 1,236 firefighting personnel are on the scene as well as 58 fire engines plus water tenders and bulldozers, according to the Silver City Daily Press. The major strategy is to ignite and control back burns to stop the advancement of the main fire.

Smoke plume

Here in Silver City we are over 30 miles east of the area that is burning, but prevailing winds have brought us the smoke, producing occasionally an ominous fire cloud overhead in shades of brown and gray and yellow. Dick has driven out to the west to take pictures, and captured this impressive plume of smoke when the fire found a lot of fuel all at once. Up to the minute information available at: http://www.inciweb.org/incident/2870/.

The plants we didn’t cultivate

When we first arrived in New Mexico, we thought that all this sunshine ought to be good for some gardening. We soon discovered, however, that the dry climate makes consistent watering an absolute necessity, the soil is rocky and hard, the relentless sun sucks up any moisture that might have been available, and if anything can live through all that, the deer eat it. We decided that gardening, which seemed like quite enough work in New England, was not going to be enjoyable here, and we gave up the idea.

Yucca plant

This has been a year of little rain, but nature is determined to put on a show for us nonetheless. The yucca plant out by the wall was all ready to bloom two years ago; I waited impatiently for those creamy white flowers, but before the flowers appeared – Chomp! Some lucky deer had dinner. This year I thought I was ready for it. I was out there with my camera when the first traces of white appeared around the red shells of the buds. I had hoped for one more picture, and Dick chased the deer away several times before they finally got it…

Agave
One week old

Two years ago a large variety of agave (century plant) sent up its spectacular 40-foot mast in our yard. The one that will bloom this year is of a smaller variety; the mast has finished growing, and it is only a couple feet above my head. The flowers, when they bloom, will extend it perhaps another two or three feet. This is average. But what fun!

Three weeks old

 

Two weeks old

 

 

 

Moving the furniture

I’ve never been one for rearranging furniture. I’ve heard of wives who drive their husbands nuts because they are constantly needing help to move heavy couches and beds; I, on the other hand, get used to things as they are and then don’t see them anymore. I can ignore all sorts of inconvenience and ugliness by simply tuning it out. We lived for almost 25 years in Putnam with the chairs at the round kitchen pedestal table oriented to the four walls, constantly in the way of opening the refrigerator or the dishwasher. Finally some quirk of fate turned the pedestal 45 degrees; suddenly the chairs were pointing into the corners of the room and there was so much more space!

Where should all this stuff go?

the original position for the new couch

The arrangement of our living room here has been a similar case. First I had tried to establish a color scheme based on the terracotta tiles around the Kiva fireplace and their turquoise accents in the figures. A Navajo rug on the wall was supposed to add to that effect and failed miserably. Then the couch arrived. It was not quite the right color, and sat with its back to the wall, too far away from the chairs for anyone to want to sit down there. Being against the wall also put it at an odd angle to the rugs on the floor, which are aligned with the fireplace and the steps. I essentially gave up on the room. It seemed destined to remain a hodgepodge, and I closed my eyes to it.

New arrangement

Over a year later we bought another Navajo rug. Dick laid it casually over the couch while trying to decide where to put it – and it seemed made to be with that couch. New vistas opened in my mind. I moved the couch out from the wall and angled it to agree with the rugs on the floor. The new Navajo tapestry went up, and the room is much more satisfying. Not “decorated” – heaven forbid I should live in a house that looks decorated instead of lived-in. Now it looks a bit more like someone actually lives here.

Writers’ Group

Six women busily scribbling, a small segment of time set apart to plumb the depths of our minds and see what oddities and wonders roll out. We can sometimes surprise ourselves, or at other times, find nothing but a lump of coal, as I am doing now. Ideas are nothing right now; they cannot compete with the lingering taste of a Cadbury crème egg and the memory of warm sunshine on my face at the noonday. No ideas for me; the senses rule. The pens scratch away, and I may be the only one who notices the machine sounds in the hermetically sealed space where we scribble. Outside the sun fades, sinks; it will be dark and the sky full of stars when we emerge and take up our lives again, after these two hours, different from all other times.

Progression

Shop/Library/Garage

Once upon a time, 1978 to be exact, an architect designed a nice comfortable house with an open floor plan, some bedrooms in the back, and a 2-car garage. Some people lived there quite contentedly for a while. The house changed hands, and the new owner said, “I need a family room a lot more than I need a garage, here where it never snows.” He converted the garage, and even installed a wet bar. To keep the sun from fading his car, he put up a carport on the end of the house. Nothing lasts forever: the next owner said, “I need a workshop much more than I need a carport.” So he enclosed the carport and put in a door and windows and a workbench. He neglected, however, to fix the leaky roof. Fast forward to 2007, and the new owner said, “That family room will make a dandy library once I build some shelves out in that workshop. But I’ll have to get a garage built for the cars, up the hill on that little flat place.” We predict the next owner is going to say, “It’s too durn far to walk to the garage, and that would make a super workshop. I’ll just open up this leaky little workshop and have a carport…”

On the road again

When do I get to go on the road again?! Cooped up for all these months of healing, tied to my bed for an afternoon nap and to my exercise equipment for gaining strength, I’ve left my traveling companion to travel on his own. I want to be out there again. The sunset out my window is delightful and different every day, but I want to see the sun setting behind wind turbines, behind oil derricks and skyscrapers and the St. Louis arch. I love Cottonwood Creek, especially in those rare times when it has water, but I fondly remember fording the Pecos at Pandale (“population varies”), and I long to see again the sluggish Mississippi carrying barges at Memphis, the mighty Colorado trapped behind Hoover Dam, and the rushing torrent at the bottom of Quechee Gorge. The roads of Grant County are becoming familiar, but just let us get on the road for a few hours and we’ll find roads we’ve never seen before. We usually find roads that we can’t identify without a local atlas. Turn off that silly GPS. Get me lost.

A strange night

Why had I come to Worcester, Massachusetts? Not sure, but I was to stay with some people who had a tiny apartment in a rundown building in a partly-industrial section of town. They showed me my bed, in a room with other beds where strangers would be sleeping. I stowed my things and asked the most important question: How would morning coffee happen? They showed me how the coffeemaker worked, a convoluted process that involved squeezing grounds out by hand, and I decided the best course would be to find the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts. I set off on my main quest, which was to get to the Subaru dealer. I found it, near the railroad tracks, and handed over my keys to the mechanic amid the squeals of machinery and the thrumming of huge diesel engines. A quick stop in the ladies’ room, which seemed to be an extension of a meat-packing plant. Behind the toilet stretched a huge bin of whole bologna, and there was blood all over the floor. Wait – the blood was mine; I was hemorrhaging quarts.
Then Dick sneezed and I woke up, never in my life so glad to be safe in my own bed, not in the hobgoblin land I had been visiting.
Does anyone out there do dream interpretation?

Christmas

This was a Christmas gift to ourselves, a trip to see friends and family. In October, we went East; this time we traveled West. First stop, two days with friends in Arizona. Their new house is a wonder, built in 2005 right under the nose of awesome mountains with their ever-changing weather. We were eminently comfortable and had a great time. There is a portable firepit on the patio, where on one chilly evening we toasted marshmallows and the “girls” hopped into the hot tub. My back loved the warm-water jets.

Rainbow at the left...

Onward, meeting up with Dick’s cousin. After a restaurant dinner, we went back to her place for pie and coffee, and I got to hold her pet hamster, who went burrowing into my armpit and ended up somewhere on my back underneath my jacket; I had to have help to dig him out! I wish I had a picture of that!

Always the first stop...

Dick’s sister and family are in California; we went by way of Death Valley, since neither of us had ever been there. The camera does not do it justice, it’s vast and imposing, and colorful in places. It’s 150 miles long and 50 miles wide, and it seems like you can see all of it from the southern end (probably a false impression). The place called Badwater is 282 feet below sea level, with a vast plain of dried salt from the minerals in the spring, and the peak looks down from 11,000 feet. The mountains tower above, and the flat valley floor reflects the blinding sun in mirages and colors that may not really be there.

But even in Death Valley, we wore jackets and extra layers. I had packed for the normal temperatures, and of course it was 10-15 degrees below normal everywhere we went. We stopped at a mall and bought more warm clothing. We returned home to new snow and a “back-door cold front” that had the pellet stove still warming the house up a day later from the 55 degrees we found when we got here.
Our time with sister and brother-in-law and their teenage kids was just what family-time should be. Everyone was on best behavior, and the younger generation sat around and talked with us just like people; if they brought their SmartPhones to the dinner table, they were very discreet about it. It didn’t matter that Dec. 25 was five days away nor that the weather was overcast and chilly; this was Christmas.

Ashford Mill ruins

Chocolate and vanilla mountains

Salt flats

I'm cold!

Thanksgiving morning

I really don’t want to deal with the burdens of life at all, thank you; not today when the sun rose to find frost on the windshields and ice on the puddles, and I could stride out on two good legs and breathe crisp cold air into two good lungs (but try as I might I couldn’t smell anything; this dry thin air has no smell). There I was in a warm jacket and pants and gloves and earmuffs and looking forward to breakfast at the end of my walk, knowing so many folks don’t have any of these things but having a hard time feeling anything but sheer joy at the pink of clouds touched by the rising sun and the changing light on the mountains.
Is this entirely too idyllic for you? Do you need something scary bounding out from behind a tree, something bigger than a rabbit and four deer? Some ominous loud noise, not just the squawking raven perched on the pole? Some sort of excitement, an upset, or a turn of events?
Absolutely nothing happened to spoil my morning walk.

Standard time again

At last it’s light enough in the mornings so that I can go out and walk when I like best, around 6:30. I know, the sun is coming up a minute or so later every morning for another several weeks, but for now I’m enjoying the light. I never have been fond of daylight saving time; it may save someone’s daylight, but not mine.
And while the extra hour’s sleep in the fall is nice, turning all the myriads of clocks back an hour is almost too much. The only one that makes any sense is the fancy one in Dick’s car: it has four buttons – plus an hour, minus an hour, plus a minute, minus a minute. Push one button and it’s done. You get what you pay for. The cheap clock radio in the guest room took me about ten minutes to change. There are two buttons on the bottom, for hours and minutes, unlabelled except for a little greater-than symbol (a caret [^] laid on its side). The button on the left has one symbol, the other has two. So guess which is which. Give up? Me too. I pushed one; it was minutes. So then I had to push it 59 more times to get back where I started. Oops, finger stuttered, went too far; go around again. Finally I gave up, with the clock two minutes fast. Forget that, I’ll do the hours. Push the other button eleven times. But can I stop at eleven? – no. Go around again.
I think I’ll just go back to bed until spring when all the clocks will be right again.