Who could ask for anything more?
The parade is about to start. Behold the angel of mercy bearing hot dogs and iced tea. Six blocks at least in the twinkling of an eye, absolutely brilliant! I’ll post some parade photos soon, but at the moment it’s 2:14 a.m., so…
(The sun goes into Leo tomorrow, yay!)
I took this shot in April. Lots greener now!
Someone needs to buy this. It’s my late Aunt Mary’s house in the country between Augusta and Vassalboro, Maine, about an hour from the ocean. Built in 1820 and extensively upgraded, it’s the kind of place I’d jump on if it were just a little cheaper (listed for $255K) and oh yeah, not in Maine. I have nothing against Maine. In fact, it’s very nice. Highly desirable, even. Just kind of cold and claustrophobic with roads hemmed in by dense, dark woods, and of course it’s far away and very strange and everyone smokes cigarettes.
Now, if she had given it to us, I might be tempted. Saving a couple hundred thousand dollars would turn anybody’s head. Plus, we know this house. I wasn’t 30 seconds into showing my wife the listing with all the pictures before she had her pianos placed downstairs, my office in the upstairs apartment, and a herd of llamas in the pasture. I mean, she moves fast. And I have to admit that when I stayed there back in April, I thought about what it would be like to live on Cross Hill Road. It’s 15 minutes into town. You could heat mostly with wood, grow a garden, and buy live lobsters in the supermarket. They even steam them for you while you wait.
It might also be a tough place to live if you’re not familiar with rural life. With 32 acres of woods, a scary 193-year-old basement, and months of snow and ice, you’d have your hands full keeping it tidy and repaired. There’s grass to mow and trees to prune. Chimney cleanings, sump pumps, and storm windows to deal with. The odd varmint invasion. You’d want to paint the outside every few years. And did I mention that there’s an oil furnace? So you’d be burning lots of wood, of which there is fortunately plenty. It’s always something and you never get done. I learned that in a much milder climate on our 2.57 acres back in Maryland. In this regard, a solid stuccoed adobe surrounded by rocks and sagebrush in the desert does allow for more spare time!
The most impressive thing, however, is the value in this place compared to what you’d get in Taos for the same price. The same can be said for many other locations as well, like my current log-cabin-home-in-the-sky spot in the Pacific Northwest, about which I know nothing, naturally, and need to be watched. I did build trails in the back country in Olympic National Park for half a summer in ’62, and that was pretty slick. (There was even plenty of sunshine.) If we ever pulled up stakes from here, I’d rather go west than east, I think.
But what I’d really like is for someone to just buy this house in Maine. It’s a great opportunity for the right people. I’ll get a tiny piece of the sale and so will a lot of other folks. That’ll help move things along. Fantasizing even briefly about my aunt’s house showed me how good it would feel to have our own place again. I know it’s going to happen, one way or the other. The desire is there. Today we watched the fiestas parade on the Paseo in downtown Taos. Across the street was an old adobe home tucked back in the trees that’s now a lawyer’s office. What a cool location. I never wanted to live in town, exactly, but I could see it with a house like that. Something about it reminded me of Austin, of all places.
Now isn’t that weird?
Saw two of these within 20 seconds of each other on the same trail
Thought I’d run out of horned toad photos, eh? Not on your life! This young one is a little over an inch long. And see that dried sagebrush leaf? Note its size relative to the baby horny toad and then look at this shot, where you see an adult surrounded by scads of sagebrush leaves. By my quick reckoning, this shows the kid to be a little longer than the adult horned toad’s forearm. Whoa! Can you say small? I thought you could.
Sometimes they ride on a parent’s back. I once saw an adult with two babies. At my approach, the kiddies jumped off onto a couple of rocks, and their color changed instantly to match. It was the damnedest thing.
Pow-wow announcer studying the program or looking at his phone
Someone was watching me, or was I mistaken? I took a couple of steps to the side and turned away to take a picture. Damn! No, there she was, a short, thin 60-ish woman with curly gray hair and a big rain hat, circling around to peer back at me. It wasn’t raining. I stared at the mountains and pretended not to notice. (No eye contact! No eye contact!)
“Excuse me,” she said, manuevering under my nose. “Do you live here?”
“Yes.”
“Well, did you—um, what’s your name?”
(Taos!)
“Uh, John… John Farr.”
“Oh yes. I thought so. You coordinated the writers series one year. But… did you move away?”
“Uh, no. But I’ve been keeping kind of a low profile.”
“Oh.”
“And your name is?”
“Well my full name back when I gave you the manuscript—[edit, edit, edit]—and it was supposed to be published—[edit, edit]—and I never heard anything—[edit, edit, edit]—and…”
Ahhh, it was all coming back. Yes, what was it, 11 or 12 years ago? I was taking submissions for a writers series—one of those things where different authors give readings every week—and she’d driven out to my house to hand-deliver a channeled manuscript. That’s right. She hadn’t composed it herself, the entity did. Now, understand that I’m perfectly comfortable with this in the real world. I get things channeled to me all the time. Every word I write pops into my head from somewhere, yes? So as far as I’m concerned, this happens. But while I was down with taking dictation from the spirit world, this entity needed to keep its day job. I never had to sell it to the board. How many other books had the entity written, had the entity ever won any awards, did the entity know any rich potential donors, and so on. Never came up.
But now I agreed with everything she said. Sympathetic, nodding, making no suggestions. The conversation petered out and there she stood. A longish moment followed. Then a faraway dirigible caught my eye—I hadn’t seen one like that since 1933 and had to get a better look! I moved a couple a steps over to the right and fiddled with my camera.
“Oh—bye…” she said and wandered off, in the manner of someone who didn’t quite get what she wanted. I wondered if I had her confused with someone else. What was this “supposed to be published” thing?)
Either way I had it covered though, so that’s okay.
Too many photographers! Shooting between heads, sigh.
This is from the 7:30 p.m. Grand Entry at the 2013 Taos Pueblo Pow-wow. My wife says I don’t like to take pictures of people, but that’s not true: it’s just that I’m shy, and the photos have to be candid ones. This means a lot of sneaky pictures with the telephoto lens. Unfortunately, there were scads of guys with telephoto lenses sneaking around. Every year it seems there are more. I tried to act like, “Hey, I’m different!” But next year I’ll probably leave my camera at home.
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