Some days, when I get off track, I just stare at my surroundings. Luckily today, scarlet globemallow came out in my courtyard. I water almost nothing here. I do throw yesterday’s left over water from Cooper’s bowl on the autumn sage. It keeps the red blossoms coming and the hummingbirds too. Some days the other …
I don’t want to tick off everyone over at Acoma by even writing about the guy, but for years windy springs in New Mexico have brought Don Juan de Oñate to mind, particularly when I’m driving up the Camino Real. I can’t help but imagine several hundred Spanish soldiers and their leader, with grit in …
There’s been a mysterious golfer — maybe more than one — around here for years, driving balls off mesa tops and landing them perilously close to the windows of my faux-adobe hideaway. So far, no harm done. But if he or she ever beans one of Placitas’s free-roaming horses, who also regularly leave things in …
We had to double up sleeping-wise at my grandparents’ home. I guess because I was the oldest brother, I got to sleep with my grandfather, Homer Wilbur Robertson — my grandmother bumped off to another bedroom with one of my aunts. I went to bed tonight barefooted, nearly 60 years later, with the season warming. …
Question: How many Santa Feans does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Three. One to change the bulb and two to step back and say how good things used to look.
As often happens with me, but not often enough, I drifted onto a Calvin Trillin trail this morning. He wrote one of my favorite descriptions of Santa Fe. Here’s the key passage, which I keep framed in my affordable, some-distance-from-Santa Fe home to remind me of certain habits and lifestyle developments I mean to avoid: …
My 35-year-old father, Bob Robertson, struts for some of the San Francisco Chronicle gang in 1963 after walking 50 miles around the city in 20 hours, taking up President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to the Marine Corps for one of the paper’s gag stories. He did it fueled by martinis and oranges, so the tale …
If I did not have the day off, I probably would be dwelling on endless political back-and-forth and missing fun stuff like this travel piece from the Navajo Times, “Sheep Springs is the gateway to everywhere,” and this great 1982 photo of World Champion bull rider Charles Sampson from the National Finals Rodeo. I know …
Pie for breakfast is good. Taking your time getting out into the day is good. Having the time to read something that doesn’t involve electoral politics is good. (I have twice in the last two days run across the perplexing epithet “extreme politician” and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry). And, of course, …
Dreamranch is experiencing severe drought while I deal with the New Mexico Legislature. Find my online Legislature columns for the Albuquerque Journal here.
dream ranch 