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By late afternoon, it was 45 °F colder than 24 hours before. Soon there were four inches of wet snow bending down the trees. After supper, the lights went out. Juan’s mother was dying in Tucson. It was just another day on the frontier.

* * *

There was more snow than Juan del Llano had seen all winter. It came down as big wet flakes in howling wind, and then the wind died down, and clumps of snow fell straight down long after sunset. That was fine, but all the Aprils in his wounded brain had turned to flowered green oases where mosquitos never bit, and cold winds never tore the blossoms from the trees. A dozen years of Blood of Jesus springs like rolling atom bombs compelled the refuge, but he also wondered if it held him back.

Suddenly a “WHOMP” and then a “BONK bonk bonk! Bonk-bonk-bonk-bonk BOOMF bonk whomp!”

The cat was staring at the skylight with her ears pinned back. Raccoons, by God, Juan decided, maybe even bobcats.

“WHOMP whomp bonkety-bonk-bonk, duh-duh-duh-duh bomf!”

And then he realized it was heaps of heavy snow dropping from the trees: first the big clump, then the small ones falling in a volley when the branch sprang back. Oh.

Juan thought about his 90-year-old mother in Arizona, lying in a bed she’d never leave alive. No more watching quail in the arroyo for her, no more taxes, no more Safeway. Also no more calling 911 to say the house was full of snakes or where her neighbor had buried a poisoned husband. What a year of changes, he thought, sitting nervously down to read, while the sound of what now felt like frozen chickens falling from the trees punctuated his reflections.

And then the lights went dead!

He sat there calmly in the dark and waited for the electricity to come back on the way it always did. In the silent adobe house, the crackles from the wood stove rang like gunshots. Another moment passed, and nothing happened. Juan sighed, stood up, and felt his way into the bedroom for a flashlight. Where had he put those candles? And how was he to heat a cup of coffee with the microwave disabled? It was looking to be a longish night, and without raccoons, a little duller.

The candle part was easy, once he had a light. He placed two of them beside his favorite chair and two more on the table. And the coffee, as it turned out, was a matter of remembering. The gas stove still worked, once he lit it with a match, and he heated leftover coffee in a saucepan, like his father did before him. There was nothing else to do except play his bouzouki, but that would scare the cat. Sighing once again, Juan retrieved his laptop and sat down to write. The battery was charged. All was well in Juanville, except now the candles were too bright…

It was amazing how his eyes adjusted to the gloom. Not only did he have to turn his head to keep from being blinded by the flames, they felt too hot beside his face! “WOOMPH bonk bonk-bonk!” from the roof, little crackles from the stove. Turning down the brightness on his screen, he waited for the voice of God to whisper tiny phrases in his ear. To his great surprise, it happened right away, and Juan began to write.

In the chair beside the candles, there were no distractions, save the clomping and the thumps. With the power out, he couldn’t check his email or yap on Twitter when the inspiration slowed. And then he noticed something odd and beautiful: while he waited in the pauses, doing nothing but expecting, little gemstones trickled out. Every sentence that fell into the silence was a marvel, every metaphor was gold. He tried to write them down, but each one was the seed of something new and couldn’t be connected. Afraid no more of losing, though, he tossed them back and kept on going. Who cared that the power was still out? He had found the motherlode.

Nothing whirred or buzzed or beeped. The lights flashed on once for just a moment and then stayed dark. Juan wrote and wrote and wrote.

Finally and not unpleasantly, a premonition arose. What if the power never did come back? Maybe this was it, and life would never be the same. People would wake up in the morning, find all their toys were cold, and have to talk to neighbors and share food. The banks would all be dead. No one would have money, and no websites would exist to blare the terror of the day. Nothing but whispers in the mind, a different song on every lip, and sitting underneath the trees.

Just then the power came back on. It was a little after midnight. Juan’s initial reaction was disappointment, which surprised him. The connection to the Source of All That Is was gone in any case, he thought, and so he plugged his laptop in and went to bed.

The morning dawned bright and clear with a little mist. Juan sat down with his coffee as the sun loosed frozen snow from overhead again. In less time than it takes to tell the tale, the power failed again. Juan just picked his laptop up again and wrote some more. The quiet concentrated every thought, and he was calm. At 9:25 a.m., his cell phone beeped: 600 miles away in Tucson, the old woman had slipped the bonds of Earth and joined the spirit world.

The opening he’d felt the night before had been a sign. Nothing that he needed had been missing, after all. He felt the emptiness the way he missed the perfumed springs of yesteryear, the way the melting snow ran off the roof and sank into the ground.

I seem to have popped naturally out of some kind of fog, which surely has to do with fleeing Tucson. The best thing that happened to me since we returned from darkest Arizona—a place my wife tells me not to condemn just because of how my parents lived—is that I’ve rediscovered beautiful New Mexico, and in the process reconnected with the best of who I am.

Down in Tucson, where the temperature will soon shoot up and render life impossible, a pall of dust and smog obscures the mountains. In the vastness of el Norte, the horizon cuts you like a knife, and we have three more months of winter they call “spring.” But compared to Arizona, New Mexico is like comfort food. It’s crazy here in Taos, but it isn’t mean, and there’s a soothing tolerance. Arizona feels like it wants to beat you up.

Just six miles from my own front door, the 2,581 acres that comprise the Taos Valley Overlook have sat there unbeknownst to me for years. Sometimes medicine is like that: when you really need it, it appears. See that picture? I’ve walked past this spot four times in the last two days. That’s almost three hours of hiking, during which time I passed three other people on the trail. When I start walking farther on the nine-mile loop, there may not be anyone at all.

To me, this is the greatest joy. All I have to do is walk alone in Nature, and I’m fixed. I can’t believe I live where I can do this any time I want. When I get out of my poor old truck at the trailhead parking lot, I’m so excited, I can’t think straight. (Do I have my water? Did I lock my keys inside??) On the winding trail with no one else around, I feel completely whole. The life force is so great, you could put a bullet in my brain, and I might not even notice. Below me lies a RIFT VALLEY, Jesus Christ, where the continent pulls apart. Magma, chilluns! Everywhere you look, another “dead” volcano. Can you imagine the magnetic forces here, the energy in the earth?

The Rio Grande didn’t carve the gorge, it simply flows on down the crack. You’d think a human could be half as sane.

The whole thing was her idea. Since our favorite restaurant was featuring music of a certain kind with dinner on Valentine’s Day, my wife suggested taking me there the night before, which worked out splendidly. The place was relatively quiet, uncrowded, and the food was wonderful—it always is. Meanwhlle, the lady was flying high.

She’s been renting her piano studio from a lady artist of great vision, passion, and impeccable skill. The two of them are like soul mates, and she’s always wanted one of her landlady’s paintings but hadn’t made a move yet. Waiting for the right moment to visit a gallery and get serious, I suppose. But the landlady and her husband have to sell the property—my wife will continue renting from the new owner—and she’s sorting out her physical affairs. Yesterday she brought two paintings over to my wife’s studio and presented them as gifts in exchange for the pleasure my wife’s music had brought them. My honey was literally speechless.

I sat there in the restaurant bathed in the thrill of her joy. Her eyes, her laugh, even the bones in her face were all humming the same tune. Her energy was like oxygen to me. I sat up straight and leaned in closer to not miss a breath.

Tonight before dinner of a very different sort, carne asada pork burritos with pinto beans, I complained about my day. I told her how much I disliked having to work on my mother’s taxes (!), how frustrated I was that everything I wanted to accomplish was taking so long, and that I was afraid my life would never come together before I die. (An old story in this neck of the woods, appropriately booed.)

After dinner and a couple of catch-up episodes of Downton Abbey on Netflix, she sat down on the sofa wearing new coral pajamas, a big fleece robe, and purple slippers to have yogurt for dessert. Instead of burying my nose in my laptop, I sat there with her and we talked. That may not sound like a big thing, but it is. For some reason, I went on about footwear in 6th grade—engineer boots with taps on the heels—and how the school banned them so we wouldn’t be “hoods.” She remembered old houses of her childhood and how privileged she felt when she got her own bed. We talked about our old house in Maryland. She wondered if she’d ever get to stop moving her pianos.

Later she came out of the bedroom to kiss me goodnight. She’s light on her feet. I can pick her up with ease, all muscle and spin.

No wonder artists give her paintings.

No wonder I’m here.

“Quiet!” she hushed, raising an index finger to her lips and cocking her head. She meant it, so I shut up.

Seconds passed. “What is it?” I asked softly.

“Like something outside, a wild animal, coyotes howling or something,” she replied, still searching for a match.

Personally, I didn’t wonder. It’s hard to hear through thick adobe walls, or masonry ones either, like in the small bathroom where we stood. Coyotes come by all the time, too, and their yelps are quite distinctive. I couldn’t make out anything, which wasn’t a surprise, but all at once, she nailed it:

“It was the toilet!”

Oh yeah. The ancient mechanism never quite shuts off sometimes, and then it “sings,” a quiet, humming, high-pitched whine that falls and rises. With a little luck, you can make it go away by slapping the side of the tank. I could see how the sound might be mistaken for a howling beast some miles away, rattled down arroyos and carried by the wind. But this was just a 40-year-old calcified convenience, our own coyote toilet of the numbered days.

I have permission from the landlady in Pennsylvania to replace it whenever Gilbert the Magic Plumber thinks we should, which is pretty much right now. But Gilbert’s ministrations are something to be savored. I can do nothing else when he’s on the scene, nor would I wish to. So the timing must be right: the job will take all afternoon.

I should be used to this by now. There’s a rightness to living this way that I appreciate most deeply. If only I weren’t so impatient to make up for lost time.

In Arizona recently, my sister sorted through hundreds of photographs she’d stashed at our mother’s old doublewide in the desert. Some of them were of my wife and me, taken on visits to Tucson I can’t even remember, back in the early days when we’d drive all the way from Maryland. I looked impossibly young. Utterly, impossibly, very handsomely young. As is usual with me, I spoke the first thought that came into my head:

“Oh, squandered youth!”

Which was revealing, I thought. Too much so, in fact, so I immediately dissembled and moved on. Can’t have any of that.

Besides, it was in fact not squandered but magnificent! Even if I wasn’t rich or famous, even though I ricocheted from adventure to crisis all the time, and despite my lack of focus, understanding, or respect, I did nearly everything I wanted. We’d go skinny-dipping on a pristine beach and had sex almost every day. I sailed up and down the river. She practiced on her baby grand on warm, humid nights with the windows open. Someone had a party every couple of weeks. There was lust like mildew over everything. We ate corn, crabs, strawberries, and tomatoes. I played loud guitar, built boats and sculptures, cast bronze cat skulls, painted, went exploring, and occasionally worked.

We took all kinds of trips. Early on, we drove her old VW to Mexico and back. While our friends picked out new furniture, we hocked everything to go to Europe on sabbatical. Sometimes we jumped in the car after her last class to drive 90 miles across the bay to go to D.C. for a movie or just to visit Bloomingdale’s for kicks. I’d have tequila from a flask, get high, and drive back listening to the stereo in the wee hours of the morning while she sat there with the map light on, finishing her lesson plans—over the Bay Bridge in the moonlight, hardly any traffic once we reached the Eastern Shore.

Squandered??? HELL, NO!

Just easy to forget in the rarefied imprisonment of approaching doom. I have focus now but look like hell. I feel all right but think I know the score, and so I hurry—rush about inside—leaving no damn room for glory or the magic plumber, much less the wilderness that beckons just outside the door, and all the ships lined up, waiting to come in…

The old porcelain howls of fur and footprints in the night. I will have to trust in magic and go home.