Clouds are moving left to right (toward the east)
They’re supposed to have a blizzard tomorrow on the eastern plains. The mountains will protect us from most of that, but it’ll be damn cold. (When you get down near zero, the numbers hardly matter.) Just a little snow today, probably more by morning. That’s the first batch of it rolling in above. The wind’s been blowing hard all day. There were shards of white clouds streaming across blue sky at first, and then the clouds grew thicker as the sun went down. I’m glad I got to see the almost-full moon on the snow last night, because tonight there’s not a sign of it.
This morning I found myself holding forth on Christmases gone by, especially in the early years of our relationship. The thing was, we lived in Maryland. My parents lived in Tucson and my in-laws in Des Moines. Sometimes we traveled to both places, but always to Des Moines. I remember sitting in the airplane in Des Moines with blankets over our legs, late for take-off because it was so cold outside, they couldn’t start the engines. My wife was a college professor. I was an artist with various day jobs but mostly played my guitar and vacuumed, so we usually had the time to get away between semesters. A shorter way to put this is that we almost always drove to Iowa and back in the teeth of winter.
That alone is worth a book. We always did this in the stupidest goddamn cars, too, that I always had to stop and fix. Her ’65 Volkswagen Bug, my ’64 bus, or the remarkable ’69 Saab V-4, which died just outside Des Moines, halfway through an epic journey that was to be its last in any case: a trip to Tucson to pick up my dad’s yellow Volkswagen Rabbit. We drove that bugger all the way home and nearly bought the farm on icy roads in Tennessee.
Travel was so different then, before cell phones and the Internet. I used to visit the public library before a trip. They kept a shelf of phone books from all over the country. I’d find a motel address and telephone number in Indiana, say, and write it down to stick inside my wallet. Usually the drill was drive until we were tired, stop at the next town, and see what we could find. This was after the initial period of camping or sleeping in the VW bus behind a truck stop. That didn’t last too long.
Considering how important the weather is, I can’t believe the risks we took back then. There simply wasn’t any way to know what you might run into up ahead. We’d try to pick up distant stations on the radio and hear what they were saying, but it almost never worked. You might meet somebody at a gas station who’d come from the other direction, but that was it.
Ye gods!
10:43 p.m. MST. No precip, twenty-three degrees.
Tags:
christmas,
Iowa,
VW,
winter
December 25, 2015 12:54 AM
by JHF
in
Adventure
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Very cold and windy when this was taken
God gave me this photograph. I never planned the thing that makes it special, which I’m not going to say, so I guess whatever I do mention, ain’t it.
The white band in the middle, for instance, is actually a ground-hugging cloud of snow moving in from the west in a very strong wind. As such, it’s not part of the same sky background as the white streaks above but actually much closer to the viewer. Its upper margins are so diffused, the snow blends perfectly with the distant sky. If you follow the mountains from left to right—they’re actually volcanoes—you can see some light snow between the second and third ranges. Somewhere behind that one is a much taller peak we can’t see here, an extinct volcano over ten thousand feet high, completely obscured by the snow.
Judging by the time (12:26 a.m.), I’ve made it all the way to Christmas. For a while there, it was touch-and-go. Have a fine, exciting holiday, and onward through the fog.
Tags:
Llano Quemado,
sky,
snow,
winter
December 23, 2015 12:44 AM
by JHF
in
Taos
{ }
Bulwark, temple, study, dining room, and only place to be
The wood stove is out of sight to the left, across from the chair with the lamp. There’s a leather sofa on the right that you can’t see, either. We usually eat at the bar. On nights like this—it’s snowing now—I run the stove to keep the room at seventy degrees (21°C). It’s not hard, once the adobe walls beside the stove heat up.
It’s supposed to snow through Sunday night. If the forecast holds, it could be epic. I made a food run today, and the ham my wife’s brother sent is thawing in the fridge, so we are set, regardless. We could easily be snowed in for a couple of days. That’s a relative term, of course, depending on how much it hurts to go without a thing you’re used to, like the peanut butter I forgot. It’s always something, though. You never know what’ll push you over the edge until it does, and then you’re digging out and heading down the road.
Tags:
christmas,
Llano Quemado,
old Taos,
winter
Callie the Wonder Cat, of course
Here we go again, thank God. Oh the end and the beginning.
Two weeks ago my wife and I were lying somewhere in a king-sized bed on the third floor of the Fairfield Inn in Alamosa, Colorado. It was totally comfortable and crazy as hell. (Our bed at home is so much smaller.) I followed about seventeen pillows over to where she was and she was glad to see me. Right there is pretty much the ball game, if you ask me. I told her I had something important to tell her. She put down her crossword puzzle and turned to look me straight in the eye. I said if I dropped dead tomorrow, what I most wanted her to remember was how happy I was to be here with her. On Earth, obviously, not the Fairfield Inn. That made us both cry a little and she said me too.
I’m not the man I was. I’m actually much better. They say I laughed out loud at least once on each of the last four days.
My wife goes to a Presbyterian church. Last Sunday they had a Scottish-themed service with a bagpiper, ostensibly “to get more people in the church.” You know how people are, they’ll follow bagpipes anywhere. They’d done the same thing last year and she hated the guy because he paraded up and down the aisle too much and his real gig was selling fancy bibles to the congregation. I could go on but I’d better not. I will say that my brilliant Saturday night suggestion for what to ask when entering the building, i.e., “When do they pass out the paper kilts?” cracked us both up to the point where she was doomed to repeat it Sunday morning. My work here is done, I thought. Unfortunately, it turned out there was a new bagpiper (and a better one) who stayed put, played twice, and wasn’t selling anything. Furthermore, the service was just “lovely,” a few women even wore plaid skirts, no one got to hear my joke about the paper kilts, and my wife doesn’t think it’s funny any more.
But the tipping point is past, and the days will now be getting longer. Love and sunshine are on the increase, never mind how cold it is outside or how deep the snow piles up from El Niño… A few days ago we fired the psycho-analyst. A dozen years of muddy water underneath the bridge! No wonder I can breathe. The vampired energy returns. Faith and wonder spread their gossamer wings.
I haven’t felt so good in twenty years. My kind are stubborn in that way. Heading out before the blizzard for candy and champagne, I bless the cratered road that holds us in, the dead cars and the dogs, and the bear that broke the plum tree. Pay attention and be true!
(The light you see may be your own.)
Tags:
Callie the Wonder Cat,
New Mexico,
Taos,
winter,
wut
December 19, 2015 12:32 AM
by JHF
in
Personal
{ }
Shower if you got ’em
It looks as if her beloved nascimiento (nativity scene) may have fallen from the car as we were retrieving Christmas boxes from the storage unit. The sucker had better be there still tomorrow when I heave that nasty door back open. Of course, I did forget to close the hatchback, which took about a quarter mile to figure out, but I didn’t think I’d lost a box. Traffic was pretty heavy and we didn’t turn around. It wasn’t clear that anything was gone, we hadn’t heard a sound, and so on. If it did fall out, maybe it landed inside the fence and someone took it to the office. Better yet, it never made it to the car.
My mother bought the set for my wife in Nogales in the early days when she was nice, before the crazy settled in. It’s something of a touchstone of a better time, and I remember the outing well. My wife and I had flown to Tucson for a visit, probably at Christmas, and my father had driven us all to Nogales to buy cheap booze and take us to lunch at a seafood restaurant. I had pescado al mojo de ajo. Probably everyone did. The best part was scoring several liters of top quality tequila and mescal for about four dollars each at the supermercado and a little hole-in-the-wall place that was practically giving away Hornitos. On the way back to the border—in Nogales it was at the end of the block—my wife and my mother went into a little shop and came out with the nascimiento. My honey was beaming and does every year, taking the clay figurines out for Christmas and arranging them just so.
Hauling the goods back to Maryland was easy inside my carry-on bag. Not too many years later I was on another airplane from Tucson to Maryland with the old man’s ashes in a carry-on bag on the floor, writing a song about his dying in my head. Much simpler times they were, richer than I knew, and none of those days will be back again.
Tags:
family,
love,
nascimiento,
Nogales
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