This is “down by the acequia.” Water is running high in the ditch just beyond my feet here where you can’t see. The reddish shoots are willows that the ditch cleaning crews usually cut down, but this year I haven’t seen them yet. I don’t know what the blooming tree is. The dark one in the foreground is an apple tree. Each year most of its fruit drops into the water and is carried away. I grab what I can without falling in.
Aspens and cottonwoods grow huge beside the acequia. Woodpeckers are going crazy now bashing holes, especially in the half-dead trees. Yesterday I saw an epic flicker fight: one was chasing another up and down the hillside. They flew right over the house, circled around, and then corkscrewed through the tallest cottonwood in the neighborhood, where I lost sight of them. Ten minutes later they flew back over the house, still fighting! These dramas go on all around us all the time, and hardly anybody sees.
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 .png)