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It came from out of nowhere after all that snow and cold, a streak of dry and sunny days with record-breaking highs. This happens almost every year, but usually in March. Around the first day of spring, I think we’ve got this beat and then it turns all wet and nasty. Over the years I’ve photographed more hummingbirds in snow than I care to remember. Maybe that won’t happen this time with the changing climate. I sure wouldn’t mind.

Today we drove by two more houses for sale. It doesn’t matter what they cost because we didn’t like them. My wife was silent on the ride home. That didn’t last. “That was so depressing… I’ve had it with Taos,” she said—an honest reaction I’ve often had myself—adding that she felt like moving very far away but I would never leave. I don’t think that’s true. In any case, it didn’t bother me to hear her say that like it has before. All the energies of my life conspired to bring me here. How could this be wrong? A river might change course but no one says it screwed up. The changes are internal now. It’s not raining in my heart.

I can’t believe how old I am. It makes no sense. Except for having less energy to waste, I feel as vital as I ever did. Too bad I look like hell—what Anne Lamott calls “ear-hair uncles”—but there’s really nothing wrong. (I did panic a little the other day when I was in the bathtub checking out my manly parts and couldn’t find one. Good god, it’s gone! Or shriveled. What the hell, where is it? Then today I tried again and there it was.) So I don’t know, we simply have to watch these things. Reality is malleable and so am I, apparently. Nothing’s fixed or solved but everything’s okay. There will always be a question mark. We go until we stop and then it’s on to something else.

My late sister is on my mind a lot. I’ve had a couple of messages since she died. “Be yourself” was one of them. If anyone would know to say that, she would. The words are finally sinking in now. Nothing has to be the way it was when I was crazy. This is what I’ve had to learn.

Iconic, isn’t it? To me, this says it all. When we moved from our comfortable old farmhouse on the Eastern Shore of Maryland to the mountain village of San Cristobal north of Taos in 1999, the shock was overwhelming. No, we hadn’t been there before—just to Taos, and only very briefly—nor had we actually investigated Taos County very much or even made hard plans. The new millennium was a factor, but nothing concrete or rational had a role. It was very much the grandest notion taken up on faith, the craziest, scariest, most expensive, dangerous, emotionally disruptive thing I’ve ever done. I don’t think about it much in those terms now. More like what most folks call history, but I was there.

In those days the Internet was strictly minimal bandwidth. Graphics-heavy websites like YouTube didn’t exist, nor did Zillow or Realtor.com. Blogging was in its infancy. There wasn’t any way to explore a distant locale online the way you’d do today. We just did it, in other words. My god. In Maryland the farmers spent time and money to mow the thick green grass between the highway and the the cornfields like it was a fancy lawn. In New Mexico they bridged a gap between two fenceposts with a bumper from an old dead car.

Oh, you clicked on that, did you? Probably means you’re a worrier, hah! Well, I don’t know. Why do you think I posted this in the “Mystery” category at 3:00 a.m.? We can try replacing worry with something else, I guess. Heroin, maybe, or a plate of steaming hot waffles soaking in high-fructose syrup with slabs of melting butter on top and a big glass of ice-cold milk. A new motorcycle magazine. A trip to Colorado in a stolen Jeep. Would you believe, I rejected a house because there wasn’t a decent place to park a motorcycle. Oh sure. But what am I supposed to do, roll it into the living room like I was twenty-four? I can’t do that, I have a wife, for Christ’s sake. The funny thing is, I don’t even own a motorcycle. Seems like I should wait until I have more coming in so I can pay for those replacement parts. Mine, not the bike’s. [There he goes again.] But what if I’m too old? Use it or lose it, they say. What if I already lost it? Would a Ducati Scrambler bring it back? No, wait, we need a house. That better not be gum disease, I can’t afford another implant. Now see, I’m not doing this right.

This used to be a barren hillside. Around 1961 or ’62—think proto-hippie, hard-core, early lefty-artsy-sure-I’ll-try-some days when you could almost buy an old adobe with the money on your hip—a tiny enclave did arise. At one time or another, neighborhood residents included a well-known photographer, Krishnamurti’s ex-girfriend, a couple of jazz musicians, Jerry Garcia’s ex-girlfriend, a writer and theater critic, a painter, a potter, professional drunks, and a one-time neighbor of Allen Ginsburg and Gary Snyder who used to run hashish from Turkey to Amsterdam with a trick car and guns. (Later Dennis Hopper showed up and lived for a time in a house in this shot.) The hillside stayed barren until somewhere in this time frame a few of these folks planted aspens, cottonwoods, and apple trees along the acequia. One of them, the largest aspen I’ve ever seen, died quite some time ago but stood until the power company cut it down.

Few signs of this cultural history remain. If you knew where to look and had a guide like I did, you might hear, “So-and-so built that walkway with rocks from the mountain,” or “Then he got high and tried to run over my dog,” or “That’s where we played trumpet and drums while everyone danced…” She lives high up in the canyon now but gets her mail here because the house is illegal—not up to code, no permits, no law.

There’s a small pond with muskrats. No toilet. That’s all.