Another fire in the Jemez: Diego
Random notes from an unfocused weekend:
Saturday, June 28
— Realized the last ding I put in my que-macho four-wheel-drive truck was in the prescription drive-up lane at Walgreens.
— In a still mostly poor town, was the only customer in a shop whose offerings included $72-a-pound coffee.
— Crunchy dry underfoot on evening walk at 6,000 feet.
Sunday, June 29
— I can’t wait for the monsoons, predicted to arrive the first week of July. I plan to give my New Mexico locust and autumn sage a drink from the hose tonight. I feel like I’m torturing them with my soapy dishwater. Everything else I think will make it until we get a little more of those impoverished 11 inches of annual rain.
– Temperature reading Placitas at 3:10 p.m.: 102.6.
— Smoke plume in the Jemez visible from here Sunday afternoon. Fire folks says it’s a week-old, lightning-caused fire that grew to 200-300 acres today 13 miles east of Cuba in the Santa Fe National Forest. By evening, fat columns of smoke leveling out and flowing to the northeast. Looks like fire is lying down, or knocked down, or both, for the night.
— Outside at 7:30 p.m: Still warm, 94 degrees, and not much moving except for a sorry-looking cottontail, even the lizards seeming to lie low. But a thrasher sang loudly from the top of a juniper, sounding eloquent despite his ordinary-sounding name. I don’t think it was complaining about the heat. Just had something else to talk about and it sounded like favorable comment. Thrashers always have charmed me but this one seemed to have special talents. I got my binoculars and took in the show for as long as I could take the evening bugs.
What’s really a trip is when a thrasher perches on top of the chimney, turning the fireplace into the mouth of a megaphone.
P.S. Monday morning, June 30
I am not much of a plant-talker but I could feel the vibes this morning when I walked outside after watering a few of my most stressed native plantings last night. The ground was still wet under their leaves. I sensed a renewed conviction to grow — something like happiness.
dream ranch 