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Okay, this has to be another reason why we haven’t found a better house yet. I just stand outside and point my camera. The mountains are different every minute from weather, season, light, and moving clouds. Just look at the preceding post, fergodssakes. Who the hell ever has to go anywhere, says the man whose wife does almost all the grocery shopping.

An old friend admonished me once, “You can’t live on scenery.” I guess that’s true, but so is “you can’t live on meth.”

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Great photo, eh? I caught the last rays of the sun yesterday evening by shooting this through the window beside my desk. All I had to do was turn a little to my left, and there it was! Not a bad place to work, I have to say.

And then today my wife came back from grocery shopping a little after noon. I was in the shower. While I was toweling off, she came into the bathroom to announce, “I’m sorry, but this phase of our life is over. It’s OVER!!!” My reaction?

“I hear you!” (Repeated twice, with sympathetic emphasis…)

Now, before anyone gets excited about sending me real estate listings for cheap housing in Bugsplat, understand that she meant living at the bottom of a long muddy driveway in the snow, struggling with half a dozen grocery bags that required at least three trips. This driveway. (There are other issues, but this will do for now.) You can’t even see our car in that linked photo. We park it up there in the winter to avoid being trapped after a snow, and my truck doesn’t get out much before March, either. I realize that’s not much of a hardship in a world where most people don’t even have bathrooms or a country where kids get freedom holes blasted through them every day, so I’ll just say a little easing would be nice.

It’s time.

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Looks peaceful here, eh? There was more snow than these few inches—a lot more—just 10 days ago, then came the January thaw: about half of it turned into water that became a small stream running down the hill, and then it rained… The wet stuff came with a roar in the night, as the wind at the leading edge of the storm sent garbage cans, a cat carrier, rakes, and branches crashing against the house. One very precious large ceramic pot blew over and broke because I had a little piñon “Xmas tree” stuck inside that acted as a sail. By the time I opened the door at midnight to see what the ruckus was, the stream had turned into a river! In the morning light, debris was everywhere, and walking to our car was impossible without encountering soupy mud.

A day or two of sloppy quiet followed. Then late yesterday afternoon, the northwest sky turned almost black. The wind picked up, the temperature fell off a cliff, and soon it began to snow. Before it hit, I took my sick ass outside and brought in three loads of wood, although I nearly fainted from the effort. Almost a week of cold or flu or some goddamn thing had left me with mucous-filled lungs, struggling to breathe.

For three straight nights, I’d never really slept at all. I coughed so much, my hernia scar began to ache. I had no appetite and dropped seven pounds. To save my wife, I’d taken the dead landlord’s sofa instead of the bed. Like sleeping on sacks of hardened concrete with that thing, and it didn’t work, of course. Every time I laid my head down, I was gargling green slime. Thank God I’m better now and have an appetite, but the damnable plague is in my ears. Crackle-crackle “what did you just say?” and so on. This stuff is getting old, I tell you—especially the mud. At least my mighty immune system has more antibodies in the gas tank now, so maybe next year I’ll sail through.

Today? More snow (just wait). Tonight? Back down to zero! By the weekend? High 40s and another thaw, ye gods. I’d wait to leave the house by April, say, except we’re almost out of bread.

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The fish has emerged from underneath the snow. You know, “the fish.” The carved stone fish from Michoacán from 1978. We’ve carried that thing everywhere we’ve moved.

My wife and I had barely gotten together. My parents were renting a home in San Miguel de Allende and invited us down for a few weeks. That was before the drug wars, but Mexico was pretty scary, anyway. Not as tense as hanging out with my mother and father, though. San Miguel de Allende, Jesus. We didn’t know what the hell to expect. All the way down there in a ’65 VW Beetle, hardly a word of Spanish between us. When we finally pulled into San Miguel, it was instant Middle Ages! Narrow cobblestone streets, beggars, here and there a donkey. There were houses hidden behind walls with massive wooden doors. My parents rented one of them.

It was all so crazy. Still the John & Helen Show, but down in Mexico. There was a woman who washed our clothes by hand in a little shed out back. Her name was Juana, and I’m afraid I called taking her the laundry “putting ’em in the juanawasher.” A fellow named Francisco stood in the yard and held a hose to water the trees. Inside, the house was normal enough, with lots of tiles and funny bathrooms. There was no TV or even radio that I remember. At night you ate and read or in my parents’ case, got drunk and threw things.

There was an expat community of some size then—it’s surely bigger now—and all of them were nuts. I think they mostly got together to booze it up and chase each other’s wives, which must have suited Dad just fine. They also smoked a lot of cigarettes and spent time looting the nearby towns of handicrafts and objets d’art they’d buy for next to nothing. Some of them, like my mother, were genuinely interested in Mexican culture and did their best to learn the ways and mores of the people in the markets and the countryside. We were on just such an overnight excursion with my parents into the neighboring state of Michoacán when we found the guy in the woods on top of a mountain selling carved stone fishes by the side of the road.

Mexico was like that then. Maybe it still is, but I doubt it—serendipity and bags of human heads don’t mix well in my imagination. Michoacán was beautiful, though, something like a wet New Mexico. And here was this fellow with the fishes, in the middle of nowhere, really, and my wife bought one. That one, up there. It was good we stopped, in any case, because riding in the back seat while my father chain-smoked made me carsick.

But there’s the fish again. I love that thing. So stark and pure. Wherever it lives, my wife does, too. I’ll either be nearby or in a memory, so mark it well.

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