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You can’t say we haven’t done it. Well, you can, but that would be wrong. I will forever be proud. If anyone ever mentions “old Taos,” this is what they mean. It does work. Inside thick adobe walls, we almost never hear a thing outside. It’s cozy in winter, even if the wood stove and the dust and God knows what else one breathes can lead to headaches, angst, and other strangeness. (Maybe plague and hantavirus!) We’re ready for central heat and insulated glass, however—oh, and yes, a dryer. A woman we know who lives way the hell out in the goddamn boonies with elk and bears and shit was listening to my wife explaining about drying laundry by that stove. “You don’t have a dryer?” she asked. I mean, come on.

Ah well. The piece that used to be here just didn’t work for me. But I love the photo, so I’ll leave it up. (When I asked her to stop so I could take her picture, she pulled her scarf around her face and looked away! Check out the nostril flare.) Gorgeous!

In other news, I’m trying to get my latest ebook (Another Day in Paradise) properly formatted. That’s the big push at the moment. I haven’t gotten off the compound to take photos, so there’s nothing new to post. It’s totally splendid here, in an arctic sort of way, but I have no gumption for posting snow pictures. Snow, snow, snow. To hell with it. It’s cold, it’s white. I’m sick to death of snow and the worst part of the winter hasn’t even arrived yet. Bah!

Oh the winter, oh the winter hell! I’d rather not recall exactly when it snowed. Around Christmas, I think. There were two storms. Between them they covered the ground in town ten inches thick. Out here in the hills, the snow lay two feet deep among the sagebrush and the trees. And then the cold set in, down to zero every night, and never rose to freezing in the sunny days. The snow became the land and nothing melted, save for just enough to hang long spikes of ice along the roof—otherwise, the world of white was permanent.

At first I did the usual chores. I cleared the doorway and shoveled paths: up the driveway to the road, around the car, and to the places where I fed the birds. The wood pile was another matter, smaller than it should have been and covered with an old blue tarp. I struggled to expose the wood. The snow was impossible to remove except by grasping the edges of the tarp and heaving with all my might. I couldn’t see how much wood was left and didn’t want to. Until I cleared a truck-sized path, there wasn’t any way to order more.

In the meantime, life went on, or tried to. For several days we couldn’t back the car out to the snow-packed road the county never plows. Each attempt resulted in my getting stuck again in different places, one time in the road. My wife would watch my progress from the kitchen window, shake her head, and plan how we would get by one more day without fresh groceries and what appointments she would have to cancel. Because the wood was low, I forbade drying laundry by the stove because that used more fuel. The clothes piled up, the tension grew.

Each day I shoveled more snow from the driveway. At first the work was fun, though tinged with worry. Digging in the quiet sunny days, I pushed until I hurt, then clomped back to the house. Soon I judged I’d cleared enough for Tommy’s wood truck and called him for a load. “Monday or Tuesday,” he told me while I winced. There wasn’t wood enough to last until then, but I made it work. Over by the neighbors’ fence there were some old pine slabs with bark attached. I stumbled through the drifts to drag them back and smashed them with a splitting maul.

There were other sacrifices. The top of the useless compost bin, some decorative short rounds, the pitch wood I’d been saving. Tuesday came and went and Tommy never showed. I called and left a message. The packed snow at the top of the driveway had turned to solid ice, but I hoped that he could make it. By this time we were driving in and out and only sometimes getting stuck. I spread wood ashes on the worst parts and worried about broken bones.

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This is another view from Sunday. That’s Taos Mountain, of course, or Pueblo Peak, which almost no one calls it. Sometimes you see a ring of clouds like that around the mountains in the bitter cold that can develop after a heavy snow. The daytime high stays under freezing. More solar radiation bounces off than gets absorbed. Everything freezes harder overnight. Repeat, repeat. Oh the awful beauty of it while you die. That’s the situation here now. The bottom layers of snow have turned to ice. There’s no way I can shovel it all. Don’t think that I’m complaining. God wants Juan to understand.