dream ranch

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.

The mighty (weary?) Colorado

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May 14, 2015

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.

Tea leaves and clouds

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May 13, 2015

Even the clouds have holes today. As for writing, it’s a six-word day instead of an 800-word day.

How far?

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May 11, 2015

My mother’s pencil sketch of her cottage and the bay at Hadlock, Washington, leaves me thinking about the uncertainty of human distance, how far we will travel.

A question lingers in the moment of the drawing, sent to me after her death in 1979.

“12 miles?” my mother asked in her neat hand, maybe wondering on a sunny day on her porch at the shore’s edge about the distance to Port Townsend.

It’s less than 10 miles by road. But did she think of other distances that day? I am left with the question.

“12 miles?”

She died just a few years later after a move to Montana, age 49.

Her journeys were long and complex, but the time still seems short.

A friend lost a daughter last week, suddenly and too soon. He has sent friends a poem and a eulogy but I cannot fathom his loss. How can this be?

Word came of two former colleagues hospitalized, one with dementia. Another friend wrote of the death of her husband’s son.

I am awaiting more evaluations of my lung cancer. Over the weekend, I re-read John McPhee’s Basin and Range after coming across an interview in which he said cancer patients had found his discussion of geologic time helpful. Today, I started reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which she wrote after the sudden death of her husband and her daughter falling critically ill.

I am more in awe than afraid. But the road seems so fragile, I am surprised to be a witness.

Mom

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May 10, 2015

Had trouble this morning rounding up photos of Mom and six children — our births weren’t exactly an orderly succession — but just wanted to say every day is Mother’s Day at dream ranch.

For Nancy Jane Bjelke to Nancy Harper, it was a big journey from Granville, Ohio, to Lennep, Montana, sometimes chaotic and not always easy, but I think she stayed happy. We loved her all the way. And she’s still with me every day.

Here are five of us back in 2002, missing Rob, the guy getting a bath in the first photo and who we lost in 1990. Hi, Mom.

Baltimore

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May 2, 2015

Looked west from Placitas this morning but thought east.

Baltimore was on my mind. I asked the Internet about the city’s underlying problems. Found more than I bargained for.

Spring cleaning

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May 1, 2015

Cooper got a professional spring cleaning to help keep him cooler in the coming months.

My treatment for lung cancer has gone well so far and — strange as it might sound — I hopefully will be scheduled for surgery later this month.

Field notes: Weather and cancer

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April 26, 2015

WEATHER: Finally, real rain. Not virga, not barreling through like a train with another destination. It’s drumming on my flat roof at 6:30 this morning, pouring from the canales, wakening white blossoms on the Apache Plume, reddening the flagstone outside my bedroom window.

It’s too good to sleep through, even early on a Sunday.

I grab my point-and-shoot before I make coffee.

CANCER: Friends have been asking, and so I report: The radiologist’s narrative following my first CT scan since completing seven weeks of radiation and chemotherapy for lung cancer began with the words “significant favorable response.”

Now, it is on to a surgeon. I meet with him and the oncologist this coming week. I’ve already been told I probably can expect more chemotherapy.

Since an x-ray on Dec. 3 and a biopsy on Jan. 12, I have been telling people I will know more the following week. This continues to be the case.

I feel fine except for trying to keep my wind with a partly collapsed lung on uphill walks. Friends say I look great, at least relative to cancer treatment. I continue to be optimistic. I am happy this morning.

I think the glass is half full and half empty. All I’m sure of is that I’ve got cancer. I am told lung cancer is difficult to treat. I struggle to understand the science, but I think I have learned that this is a long and complex haul. And I am trying to learn to live with it.

Spring trails

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April 19, 2015

First came this. Then this. Then this.

And on the reading trail, Joan Didion, in a 1978 Paris Review interview, had this to say about Ernest Hemingway sentences:

“Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.”

Field notes: Recliner for two

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April 17, 2015

Our neighbor friend Sara probably would have preferred that I bought a full-fledged recliner instead of this chair and footstool arrangement, but she has figured out how to make it work for her: backside on the stool, chin on my knee, not bothered by the gap in between.

Resident reclining expert Cooper, Sara’s pal, sometimes can’t believe his eyes.