Over the Jemez this evening.
Lori and Mike’s rescue girl Sara, watching the Muppets earlier this week. She’s come a long way from being a lost or dumped pup on the West Mesa and clearly likes the comforts of her Placitas home. She reportedly also likes watching Animal Planet and the Westminster dog show. My guy Cooper isn’t a TV fan, but Sara is still his best pal. 
Cooper, meanwhile, is the shade-up champ on morning walks. And I don’t mind at all.
I’m having my morning coffee at my desk in New Mexico and talking on the phone to my sister Hope, who’s on horseback in Montana.
When the phone rang, I was thinking about a funeral for a young woman, daughter of a friend, in a small village church, just south of Santa Fe.
Sometimes during the Sunday service, my eyes went to the window and the green slopes beyond the blue-roofed church. Remembering someone suddenly gone at 42 can make you wonder how you happen to be there at 65. Whatever ails you fades away when you look at the aching family in the front row.
My focus returned when the priest and the father and friends talk about beauty and art and joy in life, the spirit of the departed daughter. We sat on worn, wooden pews that look like they might have been carpentered by parishioners. It was a lovely service, short but heartfelt, in the rocky, cedar and pine-covered foothills, close to home, where she grew up.
Her father told a story of taking her to a big museum as a child, years before she went to Chicago for an advanced degree in art. The young girl broke into tears as she turned in a room, he said, overwhelmed by so much beautiful work.
I eagerly visited before and after the service with new acquaintances and friends of 40 years, but I am talked out by the time I reach home. I photograph the evening sky but can write only three words with certainty: “The light tonight.”
My friend Isabel spots the photograph among my posts about the funeral and other somber things on the Internet and emails me the Navajo prayer that begins, “In beauty may I walk…”
I wake this morning fearing that beauty is only a consolation less painful than love. But I also tell myself to believe in both.
I talk happily with my sister about weather and family, my young nephew’s baseball life, his dad’s summer guiding, her birthday two days away and the prospects of a brooding hen. It’s been wet this spring in Montana, too.
She reminds me of the view over the valley from where she sits her horse. And she recalls what her cowboy father used to say as he surveyed Montana landscapes in May or June.
“It’s as green as it’ll ever get,” he said.
*Note on photos: The photo of the church at Cañada de Los Alamos was not copyrighted or otherwise credited and pulled from the Internet. The Sandia sunset photo, like all of my photos, is from my iPhone or point-and-shoot.
One day I see things greening up and the next I sadly head to a young woman’s funeral. Hard to find your balance sometimes. But I wish peace and beauty for the family of Lara Calloway.
In a week’s time, war has been in the news from Mexico, El Salvador and Columbia.
The friendship of these three women and the central character’s relationship with her daughter, Rose, are among the most charming things about the Danish TV series “Dicte.”
Dicte is a police reporter for a Danish newspaper. She always beats investigator John Wagner to the crime scene, and every front-page crime in Denmark’s second largest city seems to throw them together, but I find this TV drama — received via Netflix — far better than the likes of Hawaii Five-O or NCIS.
For one thing, when Wagner comes to the door, he doesn’t identify himself with an acronym that you have to Google before knowing who’s there.
Cabezon Peak, the volcanic plug in my westward view, always adds something to sunset.
It showed up last night during a break in our extraordinary May rains.
Here is my company on a wistful morning walk. Along with Lori, Sara and Cooper.
And meadowlarks singing from the tops of trees.
The obituary for Larry Calloway’s daughter, Lara, who I remember only as a little girl, appeared in the New Mexican this morning — the words as lovely as her spirit, I’m sure, and written by her father, no doubt.
May beautiful skies always be with you, Lara.
Chamber music concert Sunday afternoon cleared cancer at least briefly from my thoughts.
Turned out it was a celebration of my recent retirement from newspapering, too.
I first realized my retirement and its pleasures a couple of weeks ago when I looked up through my living room window to watch clouds rolling in over the mountain and having a sudden, second level of awareness that I was home reading a book at 5 p.m. It was quiet as always here. Cooper was at my side.
This is what I what I would seek even on a luxury cruise. And, on a cruise, I would miss my dog.
It was my first Placitas Artist Series concert. I’ve meant to go since moving out here for 26 years ago but always let work get in the way. Today, sister-in-spirit Susan and her gracious 92-year-old pal Ruth had an extra ticket and asked me along.
The violins, bass, cello and reed organ playing Dvorák pulled my thoughts away from the status of cancer cells. With newspaper work and political ballyhoo fading, too, I was free to listen to artistry in the thick-walled Las Placitas Presbyterian Church.
My retirement was supposed to be all about time for art. So, I am grateful to Susan and Ruth for helping introduce me to the future.
And I thank my sister Hope for reigniting my interest in poetry, bringing some Richard Hugo with her when she came down from Montana.
I am still excited from seeing interviews with painters Bruce Lowney and Woody Gwyn on KNME-TV’s Colores.
I await one more scan before a decision on surgery for my lung cancer. I’ve learned that nothing is for certain any way I go in cancer treatment. I guess the point is to sit straight in the saddle whichever direction I choose to take.
John Fleck comes up with the greatest maps and fortunately puts them on his website at http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/.
Fleck, who’s writing a book on water at the University of New Mexico, excitedly notes that this new Bureau of Reclamation map defining Colorado River Basin hydrologic boundaries shows them extending into Mexico. You can find more about this on his website.
The other thing that caught my eye, though, was the reminder of the phenomenal water engineering of the Colorado River, specifically the hatched areas on the map, outside of the basin boundaries, that receive Colorado River water despite distance and topography. These include parts of southern California and good old New Mexico, clear on the other side of the Continental Divide.
Fleck’s posting of the BOR Colorado River Basin map sent me back to one he’d written about for our former employer, the Albuquerque Journal: John Wesley Powell’s rendering of what he thought Western watersheds should look like.
Watershed West: John Wesley Powell
At first glance, Powell’s map seems to make more sense. But maybe not if you want a tomato in December in New York or to escape New York’s snows for 18 holes in Phoenix. Or for that matter, water in your tap in Albuquerque or Santa Fe.
dream ranch 