Dichotomy

As I write, coyotes are howling from just outside the trailer door. Boon is foofing his warning bark at me, and Annie is pacing the hallway. My fingers are frozen from walking the dogs just a minute ago, our paths almost crossing with their yipping cousins.

A part of me wants to stand outside on the stoop and echo their calls back to them into the night and across the flats until my voice reaches the 11,300-foot peak above me – giving my mournful and wild cry as I ready to leave this place, my tiny, lonely abode in the beautiful desert. In a few weeks, I will trade its blue vistas, orange sunsets, moonrises, friendly cottonwoods, jagged, stark outlines, and crisp, crisp light for the city – a gloried but unfamiliar place of streets and 90-degree angles and so many people.

People to kiss, though! And laugh with! And to photograph! – some like I did at Halloween and its following days of souls and saints.

There is a great dichotomy between New Mexico and the East, two places that are both so different and so loved. One is fairly empty and filled with wind, one is very full and empty of sky.

My heart is here in this enchanted desert – always – and my soul sickens if I am away from it too long. But my heart’s keepers – most of my family, most of my friends, the core loves in my life – are not here. And so I am torn. I move back and forth between them, now swinging away from the west towards a place where the lights twinkle and shine below where I’m used to them blinking – from windows and buildings reflecting under an orange, glowing expanse, not sprayed like fireflies across a high, black one after the sun goes down in its own blaze of orange.

At best, I clutch the hope that one day, I’ll live in the open again and have a career that allows me to fly away east whenever I want to smile at and kiss everyone.

I miss everything all the time. I love you.

Be well.

– SAWK

 

Backlog

Over a month since my last post! . . .

Days have been brimming with laughing kids who change faster than the seasons, orange sunsets that darken with the clouds, good food and too much of it, elk sightings, playing and running jacket-less in cold air, merry-go-rounds, sleepy puppies, sleepy babies, naps, crying, and maybe a little reality TV.

I will miss this life terribly when I move east in 20 days.

Be well. I love you too much!

– SAWK

Things New, Yellow

I know it is fall here because now I have to wear pants when I take the dogs out first thing in the bright, yellow morning.

We walk around in the new morning groggily – the intense, gold light quickly burning off the haze of blankets, snores, darkness – the puppies circling my legs and spinning me, their leashes constraining my ankles like the bad guys do to damsels in old cartoons.

There is a jackrabbit. We come within four feet of it before it blasts off away from us, petrified. The puppies are as stunned as I am that they didn’t see him in time to have a pre-breakfast, protein-rich snack.

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And here is another thing as new as the morning:

Like us, he came from a dark, warm place to dreamily meet life under the yellow, fluorescent light of a new day – his first day.

So far, he dislikes the yellow, fluorescent lights of his first day, is super keen on his mama, and – like most humans – lives to eat and sleep. He cries sometimes, but really, what sad girl/sad boy doesn’t?

My family is huge and very close, and though there are only a handful of us out in New Mexico, the tiniest member now resides here.

As his mom said, “he is awesome.”

To steal the phrase from a friend and the idea from another friend, “Welcome to Earf,” Seb.

Be well, babies. See some of you so soon.

– Coon

Roping

One of my most favorite and most regular of regulars at La Ventana has a ranch northwest and not far from Grants.

It is gorgeous there – wide expanses, Mount Taylor in view, with giant, old cottonwoods to protect house and home – and he, his family, and all his cowboy friends (all also regulars at the bar) head out to the arena behind the barn every night to rope and ride before they head to the restaurant for dinner.

At the end of August, he generously allowed me to head out there to learn about roping – which I have never seen – and to take some pictures.

Thanks from the goody-good, the hippie chick, Sarah smiles, for letting her come out to the ranch. And now that I’ve seen roping and understood it a bit, I want to go again.

They are true cowboys, true men, and they’re all as funny as hell. The kids, too.

Be well.

– SAWK

View from Today

I am tallest in the morning when the light melts everything into sharp, golden relief. So is everyone.

The mountain looked so blue today that I thought for a moment that I was wearing polarized sunglasses. I wasn’t! – It was just deep and navy on its own. And the clouds that bruised the sky in heavy purples and dark greys finally brought water, fat slaps cracking on the glass of windshields and windows, brief, angry, and then over, like a temper tantrum that washes everything into calm.

Really, nothing smells as good as rain coming in the desert – pure, fresh, clean, sweet, pungent, tangible . . . It is not just the infrequency of the scent – the whiff of your gone grandmother’s perfume, the missed familiar smell of a friend when you hold and hug after a long time – though that is part of what makes it so lush, so gorgeous, so welcome, but it is exotic and comforting, new and homey in the same breath. It is exhilarating in the most steadfast of ways.

You’re all welcome to come visit and sniff the air like an excited dog with his nose in the rushing air of a 60mph car ride.

Speaking of dogs:

Things are changing. Be well.

Love, love, love.

– SAWK

 

 

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