This phase of our lives is over.* Funny how everything still looks the same and yet you know and that feels good. It ended some time ago, actually, but here as nowhere else I’ve been, the seasons dominate. 20 below zero? Okay, throw some more piñon in the wood stove and leave the dust bunnies [...]
Llano Quemado
Can’t wait for someone to ask me about the toothbrush
“What’s she doing up there?” That’s 11 and a half pounds of Callie the Wonder Cat, too. She was up in the highest cubby of the rustic [cough] bathroom sink shelving just as fine as you please. Up where it’s so dusty and scary, we never put anything there. Or had we? A forgotten extension [...]
Riffing on the tires here, gimme a minute
Yes, friends, that mountain is 12,835 ft high. The trail up to the summit is allegedly suitable for beginners, other than the altitude sickness thing if you just drove in from the the flatlands or the coast. I knew what a coast was once. If you consider this scene, it’s a conceptually close facsimile. May [...]
Shot on a Christmas visit with my parents in Houston in ’71
In the fall of ’71, it was just me and the woods. One hundred and seventy acres of them, spread across the western slope of a long forested mountain riven with streams and waterfalls. “Yellowhammer Farm,” we called it, back when there was a we. Several of us had gone in together to buy 170 [...]
The guy who sold us our car might have lived here. He got fired and disappeared.
This place is level and had utilities. (See the electric pole?) Once a residence, for sure. In Arizona, it occurs to me, this would simply be a “pull-off,” and they’d run a shiny new one in. Here it’s much more likely someone’s legacy or headache. Look, they even left their truck. The property is fenced, [...]
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