Time for dancing naked in the fields
What’s left of the Japanese plum tree outside the dead landlord’s apartment blooms one more time. Its roots reach deep into the sewer line, so it will follow “Uncle Dale” except by chain saw, not by smoking and living over the septic tank. A battered lilac must go with it.
The man’s been dead eight years. His one-room solar studio has floor-to-ceiling glass and you can look right in. Most of his things are still there. Relatives came not long after he died and carted away a few family antiques and objets d’art, but the day bed he slept on is still there with his bedding. His hat and jacket are on the clothes tree. I walk past that end of the house twice a month and try not to stare.
And I must have been doing a good job. Today I had business back there and this time I looked: what was that all over the floor and chairs inside the glass? Oh no. A vine of some kind had grown into the room through a crack in the window frame. Inside the solar-heated space, the plant had lived long and prospered, covering the furniture like kudzu, and died!
A rough brown blanket of dead leaves lay in heaps. I peered closer to see how far it extended. Not as far back as the kitchen. Less light, I supposed. But then I saw a box of pancake mix in the middle of the floor next to a grater and spatula. A cabinet door was open! Some kind of beast had been there, but when and how? That didn’t surprise me as much as the fact that no one had cleaned out the cupboards in over eight years. I wish I had a key so I could do all that and snoop.
I found the dead landlord’s bio on the funeral home’s website today. Who knew they kept such things online after all this time? We knew him fairly well, but not all the details. His full name was Kirby Dale Blair. He won three Helene Wurlitzer Foundation grants for writing and was a Taos resident for over thirty years. Before then he was the film and stage critic for a newspaper in Dallas. He wrote plays and a historical novel about a famous Texan called Quanah: The Coiled Snake. After he died, a medicine man helped several of us toss his ashes into the acequia at the bottom of the hill.
I want to remember this before I cut down the tree, a special one he planted himself years ago. Plants and animals will eventually reclaim his old apartment. Our bedroom is on the other side of the thick adobe wall, but we won’t be here to witness.
As long as we are, though, we’ll be able to flush.
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Tags:
dead landlord,
old Taos,
plum tree,
spring
April 20, 2014 12:09 AM
by JHF
in
Mystery
{ }
Why yes it is
Just woke up here, hardly anybody knows. Man jumps out of truck and yells he sees it on me, right there! Digging his hands into the air like bear claws: “This world’s on fire, John!”
Washed the rubber iguana today. Raked. Watered. Believed.
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Tags:
healing,
history,
rubber lizards,
wut
April 17, 2014 11:43 PM
by JHF
in
Taos
{ }
You’re supposed to be busting out all over now
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.
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Tags:
April,
Llano Quemado,
Rio Grande del Rancho,
Talpa
April 16, 2014 12:10 AM
by JHF
in
Taos
{ }
Not too shabby after all
By God, there’s nothing like an April morning snow to start your week off right! The way it was coming down when I staggered out of bed, you’d figure there was someone on their way to rescue us. We more or less shut down, thinking we were snowed in, but then it tapered off. As you can see, there wasn’t that much after all, and most of it was gone by three o’clock. Okay by me.
[Note: No, you’re not seeing things. There were a lot more words here once. Let’s call it “transcended content.” This is always a positive event, rejoice! – Ed.]
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Tags:
April,
snow
April 14, 2014 12:23 PM
by JHF
in
Personal
{ }
Yesterday, before the April snow
Something is going on. A panic has departed. My brain is working differently. There’s a qualitative difference. I don’t quite know how to tell you, but it’s like discovering this trust and now it’s got me. I think I caught it hiking on the mesa by the gorge.
My father used to measure everything. There had to be a template he could use to pare his expectations. That’s why he freaked out when he floated off outside his body during chemo. A clearer pre-death message no one could have wished for, and he blew it, sort of. But what does the entire experience imply?
Whatever it is we call “the heart” can handle this. For example, for most of my entire life, I’ve been obsessed with where to live and what to do, or was it what to do and where?!? Okay, I was an Air Force brat, we moved a lot; just writing that messes me up all over again, but somehow I got this far anyway. Plainly put, I’m being helped. Don’t ask by whom or what or how. But since I am, I can trust my intuition. There are no “right” or “wrong” choices to be made, only going after what I want.
You probably figured this out years ago, but no one in my parent’s generation would ever have agreed. Looks like it’s never too late to trust myself. Well, well…
[dissolve: noun (as in a movie) – an act or instance of moving gradually from one picture to another.]
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Tags:
el Norte,
home,
love,
writing life
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