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