“Look, over there!” she said.
I stared across the Rio Pueblo gorge until I spotted them, half a dozen somethings that weren’t rocks or trees, and then it clicked. “Bighorn sheep! See their white butts?” And so they were. It was like watching giraffes from a helicopter flying low across the veldt. What is this place with almost no one here? The cliffs so high, the rocks so old…
The other day my wife was napping on the love seat covered by a blanket. The sky grew dark, the wind picked up, and then the yard exploded. Half a rotted railroad tie that lined the “flower beds” blew fifteen feet away. There was crazy blowing dust and horizontal sand. All three outside chairs in front got tumbled in the dirt, while their cushions blew off into the sagebrush. Large dead branches rained down from two ancient elms. The electricity went on and off at least a dozen times in thirty seconds, and then everything went dead, leaving us without power for the next five hours. To advance the hands and reset the old G.E. mantel clock’s Westminster chimes, I had to listen to them cycle twenty times.
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)
That is a SPLENDID photo!
Splendid photo (as always).
Your line “I had to listen to them cycle twenty times” immediately reminded me of the line from Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (although I doubt that was the intent) 🙂
“The church bell chimed ’til it rang twenty-nine times, for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald”
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