This picture is so brilliant, I don’t know where to start
Warm and windy now, about 67 °F (19.5 °C), humidity 16%. You can do anything in weather like this, because the sun is glorious but you don’t get sweaty. So long as what you’re working on doesn’t blow away, it’s kind of miraculous, really. That cool/warm thing where you’re fine in shorts and T-shirt so long as you’re not sitting in the shade. The wind is blowing pretty hard, though. Every now and then a bucket of driveway dust blows past the open front door. That’s kind of a feature in these parts.
Naturally I took my four-mile hike today. As fast as I coud, no ambling. Two days ago I did the same and missed the cairn I built to mark the two-mile turnaround, walking a full quarter-mile beyond before I realized where I was. I love it when that happens. Today it hit me somewhere on the mesa in a sea of sagebrush: where the hell am I? SHUSH! And then I try to hold the state as long as possible. Oh sure.
There was more bird activity as well. Some kind of wren, I think, that ran down the trail ahead of me like a miniature roadrunner, then pivoted and fled into the bushes. I saw more than one piñon jay fly into a, uh, piñon tree and disappear. They must be nesting, because one flew out squawking with a fecal sack (doesn’t that sound just like a mother?), the avian equivalent of your neighbor tossing dirty diapers out her window. I wonder where they take those things.
This morning I was upset because I went to the dentist yesterday and now I’m out $2,500, just like that. I ranted at the office manager over the phone for no good reason—teeth are teeth and I know what I’m doing—but later called back to leave a message saying “never mind.” (It wasn’t her fault, anyway.) At the recycling center on the way out to do my hike I called my wife and told her, “It’s no good worrying about this stuff. All I have to do is love you, have a good life, and be a writer.” She laughed and drove off to get her hair cut.
This is how it happens in the spring. And then it snows in May.
They’re all dead now. Bye-bye, gone. My father, his older brother, and finally his sister Mary, 99 years old. She was fond of saying “after my demise,” so there you go: wait long enough, and everything shows up.
Mary always was my favorite aunt, up until the troubles. She tried to keep my wife and me from moving to New Mexico by crying, “But it’s a wasteland!” (So it is, in the sense she meant, and exactly why I came here.) She’d given us the money for the down payment on our house—actually an inheritance she passed on from her mother—and probably felt betrayed. I didn’t understand that at the time, but now I do.
We had some good times with her at her home in Maine. It suited her up there, I think, where the regional culture’s emphasis on what I’ll call “thrift” for now because I’m being nice meshed nicely with the family creed. She ate all the local weeds and thrived: fiddleheads, dandelion greens, lambs-quarter, berries, fruits, saps, and edible extrusions of just about anything that grew nearby and didn’t cost too much. Besides not acknowledging her due, the worst sin you could commit was wasting something. Anything at all, if it had a second or a third use. Especially food.
She had a specialty called “lobster butter.” After we’d eaten our delicious lobsters that she’d had us buy in town that day, she’d collect the little bowls of melted butter we used to dip each bite and save the dregs for later use on pancakes. That I eschewed mixing rancid bits of lobster meat with maple syrup was incomprehensible to her, though I don’t think she did it for the taste. The lobster butter was a victory over waste. (That no one else had thought of it was even better.) She kept it in the fridge and offered it as if it were the finest caviar whenever butter might be served.
And now I’ve inherited the “contents of the house.” I don’t know what that means yet, but they’ll tell me. At some point in the next few weeks or months, I’ll fly to Portland, rent a car, and drive on up to East Vassalboro. For the first time ever, as I write this, I’m looking at the name. What do feudal tenant farmers have to do with Maine? Just looking at the airline schedules and maps reminds me: take it or leave it, this is what you get.
Very Farr-like, certainly. And did I mention that they’re gone?
At least it’s colorful, if not from here, so please enjoy. Oh, and did I just post another screed and take it down immediately? Right. As soon as I find a 24-hour post delay plugin, this damn thing is gonna rock! Have a great day, and I’ll be back later. Wish I had some ice-cold vodka. Damn.
This is another clip that I’d forgotten about and found yesterday lurking on the memory card of my Kodak Zi6 video camera. It’s from June 20, 2012. The location is just a few hundred yards into Mora County on NM Rt. 518, the spot where you come over the pass and all of a sudden, you see the whole valley and out onto the eastern plains. It’s a sight to behold. Definitely try this in 720 HD if you have the bandwidth, BTW.
The soundtrack is a strange experiment from long ago that I made even weirder. I lowered the resulting volume some, so let me know how it sounds.
Rediscovered footage here! This is a short panoramic sweep of the horizon from an overlook on Kitt Peak, Arizona on April 11, 2012. I scattered some of my mother’s ashes there a few days after she died. R.I.P., Helen V. Farr. It’s the same spot where my siblings and I tossed handfuls of our father’s ashes after he died. In that famous incident, an updraft blew Dad all over our clothes. It was just me this time, with my wife watching from the car (due to the cold wind at that altitude), but I got the job done.
What’s left is supposed to go into the ground next to where I buried the remainder of the old man’s ashes in ye olde Chestertown cemetery back in Maryland. I wonder when that will happen. Ashes, ashes, ashes…
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