Biodegradable mansion on the hill
Juan del Llano couldn’t breathe. On this sunny late October day, the air inside the old adobe was just too funky. Meanwhile, at the other end of the room from where he sat to write, his wife was balancing her checkbook, a task he gave up twenty years ago after websites were invented because the bank was never wrong. Her muttered grumbling and bewilderment, though muted, rippled the mirror of the quiet lake inside his brain. There was nothing for it, Juan decided, but to go outside and play.
Winter was approaching, or so they said. The two northern New Mexico seasons being “partly thawed” and “frozen dead,” it was time to tidy up outside before his tools and other valued objects disappeared beneath the coming snow. It was time, but Juan was Juan: in a dozen years at this location, he’d already let the outside spigot freeze and break three times. Getting right to the heart of the matter then, and because the broom did not weigh much, he decided that sweeping the “patio” outside the front door was imperative and set to work.
The task involved removing the top loose layer of the hardpan clay. By sweeping up the sand and leaves, he’d have a base of rock-hard dirt, awesome to behold until it flooded from the runoff and became a bog. Grateful to be outside in the sun and free from the temptation to offer unwelcome accounting advice, he toiled patiently until the job was done, then sat down with a beer to survey his accomplishment.
The dead landlord’s patio chairs were in a new location—he’d moved them as he worked and hadn’t put them back—and Juan was jolted by the new perspective. Instead of the familiar mountain view, he now looked directly at the house: the old adobe, impossibly cheap “old Taos” rental they couldn’t live without, epitome of cozy wretchedness, emblem of imagined doom—except he liked the place this time, or was it gratitude?
The thing was, though, they’d done it, the entire Taos murder trip, yet both of them were still together, healthy, and the love danced in her eyes. Instead of keeping score, Juan was hungry to advance and knew they would. After all, the only truly stupid thing he’d ever done was be unhappy—crazy like the river rolling to the sea—and he wasn’t bitching now.
Tags:
el Norte,
healing,
Llano Quemado,
marriage
October 25, 2015 10:07 PM
by JHF
in
New Mexico
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Canyon walls, not mountains. Aieeee!
This spot beside the Rio Grande is twenty minutes and a thousand feet lower down the road from where we live. Twenty minutes, that’s all it takes, and what a different world. [You’re looking downstream here.] The water yesterday was clearer than I’ve ever seen it. With the right angle on the sunlight, there was one place I could see boulders on the sandy bottom from the car. This is radical in my lifelong experience with rivers.
There’s a certain modest little campground in the Orilla Verde section of the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument with beautiful old stone steps that lead down to a sliver of sandy beach. I was walking down the path carrying my Pentax with the telephoto lens and hood attached and a sling case over my shoulder when I met a man coming up the other way. He asked if I was a professional photographer, because the view upriver he’d just come from was exceptional. I thanked him for the tip and said this was a beautiful spot, all right.
“Stunning,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s all stunning!”
Of course this meant that I could trust him, but we parted ways.
Tags:
Rio Grande,
Rio Grande del Norte National Monument
October 21, 2015 11:26 PM
by JHF
in
Taos
{ }
Taos Mountain this morning
Not ready for this, neither physically or emotionally. But it’s a-comin’, boys.
Tags:
Llano Quemado,
snow,
Taos Mountain,
winter
October 18, 2015 11:39 PM
by JHF
in
Birds
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A rather large bird
The window is thick plate glass. It needed to be. The flicker hit with a bam like a baseball and dropped into the tall grass trembling dead. By the time I walked outside to see, the bird was still and limper than limp. I picked it up by its silver feet. The feathers that looked copper-colored in flight were beautiful translucent orange. For some reason I acted quickly, digging a hole in the garden to bury him in. Through the act of his dying he’d become one with the family, and I wanted him close by.
Tags:
death,
Llano Quemado
October 12, 2015 2:59 PM
by JHF
in
Taos
{ }
Abandoned (?) neighbors’ house beyond
My God, it’s like I never saw this path before! How long have I lived here, a dozen years? And my wife for ten? But it’s never resonated as a symbol until now. Remembering the track my grandmother scuffed across the carpet in her thick old lady shoes, walking from the bathroom to her chair, it occurs to me that if I’ve worn that in the dirt at a shaggy-dog rental over Indian bones, it’s probably time to move. It’s certainly time for something!
The path leads around the corner of the kitchen to a cobbled-together platform feeder nailed to a two-by-six I propped up with rocks and roped to the base of an old trellis. At least three times a day, every day, I walk out the front door with a bucket of bird seed and a plastic scoop. When the ground freezes hard, I step out into single-digit mornings in my bathrobe before I’ve had my coffee, even in the snow, to give the birds a chance. They come straight out of nowhere then, emerging in ones and twos and threes from wherever they fluffed their feathers up to make it through the night. No shame here, I note. Just the path, reflecting something older and invisible.
Tags:
history,
home,
old Taos,
wut
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