Glory Days

NM wildflowers

Gratefully we sneeze

Look around you, it’s happening right now. Everything in this image is a gift, the asters and the chamisa and whatever the hell the others are. The mountains and the sky.

Our trip to Alamosa yesterday, my god. The vistas and the weather. We drove through actual rain. On the way back early in the evening, a giant wall of rain between us and the sunset, glowing pink and orange like another world. This was roughly in the middle of about a sixty-mile stretch with hardly any human habitation. It’s a dramatic landscape under any conditions, but this was just stupendous. If you don’t live in northern Taos County into southern Colorado, you simply can’t grasp what I’m talking about. The impact of the scale and colors and the pure clean air leaves me reeling every time we take that road to sensory overload. In fact, we should have to pay to see this. Oh right, we do.

There was this house in town today I wouldn’t wish on a dog. Well actually, a dog would love it. Typical Taos lunacy, though. Someone had walled in a washer and a dryer to make a “laundry room” but left the doors too small to take them out when they need replacing, which they do now. To install a new washing machine, you’d have to demolish a goddamn wall. Let us not speak of the rest of this gem. There isn’t a single feature that would make me smile, and only $269K. I’m going to have to stop being nice to realtors and simply say, “My god, it’s horrible!” What do they care, anyway? The smart ones know what’s what.

But never mind: I’m going meteorite hunting in the morning. No, really. A friend of mine is taking us into the wilderness to do just that, somewhere near his gold mine. We’ll also look for lightning-killed trees to cut. If I know where we’re going, there could be hundreds of elk. Every word of this is true.

My life didn’t used to be this way. It won’t be the same tomorrow, either.

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John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on About page. For a complete list of all John’s writing, photography, NFTs, and social media links, please visit JHFARR.ART  

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