Just a little something from this morning, looking out across the valley below. I’ve always called it the Talpa valley, because Talpa is over there somewhere, but copying me could get you into trouble. There’s an actual spot called Talpa a little to the right where you can’t see. I used to say that no one here really knew where Talpa was, but it’s not that hard to stumble into: curvy dirt roads, adobe walls, and trees. Not too many mansions there.
The Rio Grande del Rancho runs through that valley, “rio” in this case appended to what would be a stream or creek most other places. It’s down there somewhere near the bottom of the shot. When I first moved in here over ten years ago, my then seventy-two-year-old hippie lady neighbor told me I could hear it in the springtime if I went out late at night, the river being swollen with snowmelt as it headed for the gorge. I didn’t believe her right away, but then one night I listened: sure enough, a faraway sibilant rattling of stones, just past midnight in a cold, damp April, back when New Mexico had the rain.
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
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