Hola! Long time no write, I know…been kind of well, chaotic around here. You’ve probably heard that the entire state of New Mexico is on fire. I got this picture last Sunday when the 2nd big fire, this one near Los Alamos, started. We were at a Janis Joplin-themed benefit for the tornado victims of  Joplin MO, of all things, where a bunch of local musicians got together at this kind of, well, I don’t want to say seedy exactly, let’s just say a well-loved local watering hole with a definite retro feel. (What can I say; last time I was at Tiny’s —1994 I think?— I was having a pre-tattoo margarita on a weekday afternoon; it’s just that kind of place. More than anything it reminds me of that restaurant we used to go in Lansing, the one we called El Mistake-o?) Anyway, that is not a funnel cloud or a mushroom cloud, but an immense pyrocumulus from a fire that burned thousands of acres in one afternoon, and now several days later is licking the edges of Los Alamos National Lab. That town has been evacuated, you’ve probably seen all the news coverage, and, you know, it’s just a replay of the Cerro Grande fire in 2000, pretty much same area, although this one is much—much—bigger and so far hasn’t actually hit the town itself.

This fire, of course, comes on the heels of our other big fire, still burning up near the ski basin. I wish I had one of those large-format cameras, because the scariest thing to see was that the smoke from the Las Conchas fire over near Los Alamos in the Jemez Mountains was actually merging with the Pacheco fire in the Sangre de Cristos, and truly, wherever you went outside you saw this massive smoke cloud on the horizon; it was like being in a ring of fire… and as you can guess, the city is totally preoccupied with the fire. My Facebook community is overloaded with images from the fires at various vantage points around the city and the eerie sunsets caused by the smoke; links to updates and press conferences and news articles; pleas and prayers and dances for rain. Will the big one move into the LA neighborhoods again? Will it reach the accumulated radioactive waste at the lab, some of it literally stored in drums under a TENT? Will the entire state be blown off the map? Meh, it’s anyone’s guess. I’m just staying inside and listening to The Cure and waiting for it all to blow over…

…Not that that’s likely any time soon. The summer monsoons may or may not start right on schedule (usually right after the city’s fireworks display on the 4th; sometimes, RIGHT after, as in, on the drive home). We’ve been watching the daily afternoon build-up of cloud cover this past week and scanning the skies for “walking rain,” the drops that never touch the ground, which you can watch across the vast landscapes as it hangs suspended in the air, but except for a few extremely short showers (2 minutes? 3?) it’s still dry as a bone out here. The cactus are blooming, but precious little else is. While the state apparently cannot legally ban fireworks (who knew? fireworks distribution is apparently one of our larger industries here) there’s plenty of concern over what the weekend will bring in the way of new threats. I remember the ’80s-era 4th of July in New York, especially when I lived in Ft. Greene; my roommate Jim O’Hare used to say it was like Little Beirut out there, so many people throwing lit firecrackers off their fire escapes and front stoops. We always go to the city’s display, set off from the high school field and usually with a fire crew in attendance (hey, we’re old hands at this drought thing…) and so far they’re not planning to cancel it, but we can only hope that the large population of boneheads in this town collectively decide that it would be very uncool to be the dude who burned down the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, on a cheerier note, our vegetable garden is exceeding all expectations. For one thing, I did not know that broccoli grows tall and leggy and completely out of control (that’s it on the left). It also takes *forever* to finally show some actual crucifer bounty; it’s all leaves, taller and taller it grows. We’ve been eating the leaves in salads and also steamed and sauteed in olive oil, along with all the other greens (rainbow chard! kale! spinachk! many lettuces!) we’ve been indulging on. The tomatoes are now too tall to accomodate the cover which nicely fits over the hoop; it was mainly to protect it during the colder months and to keep the squirrels from finding out about the abundance hidden inside. Now it’s all out in the open and *so far*–fingers crossed–the squirrels have not noticed it. We’ve got a zucchini vine AND a cucumber vine in there, some beans (yellow, I think), and some herbs (cilantro, flat Italian parsely, oregano, basil). I’ve even traded a bag of chard for a dozen eggs from one of my neighbors, how’s that for going all Seventies Hippie Commune on you?

Speaking of my neighborhood—which is, as you well know, nothing near a hippie commune but more a community of isolationists—the fire inspectors (I know, enough with the fire, already!) have determined that the fire that burned down the house down the road was started by spontaneous combustion. Yeah, really. They had some rags they used for putting a natural flax-based oil finish on some flower boxes. Apparently, they followed the directions for disposal by soaking them in water for several days before discarding…into a plastic garbage can on their wooden deck, where it then sat for a couple weeks in the intense heat, eventually starting to smolder and ignite the deck, which ran into the house like a wick…Oh, what can I say, it must have been the grace of God and Mother Nature that one day that the winds, unceasing since about February and completely unseasonable by now, took a breather and did not send the flames into a major conflagration through the whole neighborhood. Ten days after the fire we had our annual summer all-neighbors meeting, and boy did we have a good turn-out for the fire-safety presentations! The homeowner came to the meeting, something I don’t know if I could have faced had I been in his position, and told us all the story of the spontaneously combusting rags in the garbage can, and how much they miss their dogs and how grateful they were to all the neighbors. It was very moving, I don’t need to tell you. He’s just a kid, maybe 30? We collected about a hundred bucks for them, this a few days after the massive nightclub benefit we also attended (so weird going into a nightclub that is filled predominantly with 20-somethings and not being able to shake the sense of being everyone’s mom…the music was smokin’ though; I would have stayed and danced if it wasn’t getting to be on to 9:00 and my bedtime!)

So that’s the story from Santa Fe these days. I don’t think I’m going to be able to make my trip to Chicago after all; business is picking up but it isn’t great. And I might decide to go to Ohio later in the year; my cousin has been diagnosed with a brain tumor—totally operable and recoverable from, I understand—and it might be nice to go visit her while she’s recuperating. She’s been living in Abu Dhabi the past year, how’s that for a game-change adventure? Of course, brain surgery, that’s kind of  a big adventure, too….Just coincidentally, I’ve been reading about life with brain cancer (that 3rd wheel you never want to intervene in your marriage) by one of my FB friends. She talks about it with such grace and ease—her husband’s tumor, inoperable and marching relentlessly, terminally forward at a steady pace—I can only imagine what strength it must take to be able to write about it. I am so grateful that our trials and tribulations are so few and so small.

Have a great trip to the great Midwest and Northeast; I hope you don’t hit any extreme weather conditions and can enjoy your summer vacation without a care for the future…not that it couldn’t all just blow up any minute, right???…Thinking of you and wishing you could put some of that Seattle rain into an envelope and send it my way….

~love, c

Hey there, how’s like in the great Northwest? Wait, don’t tell me: cool and moist, right? We could use some of the moisture, although you will not hear me complaining about the heat. Temperatures have been in the very liveable 80s (finally), although it’s been a bit hard to really enjoy it, thanks to all the smoke from the Wallow Fire. Yes, that big fire in Arizona is actually sending huge quantities of smoke into central New Mexico. You can’t believe it, sometimes it seems as though the fire is right down the street (more on that later). For days now, we’ve been under this weird “bad air” alert, closing up the house at night when it gets thickest and trying to air things out late morning when it starts to clear. Sunsets are freaky; the sun looks like this red-orange ball behind the haze, it’s like Mars or something. (I wish I had a picture for you; so many of my friends have been posting theirs on Facebook that I didn’t bother going out to get one myself!)

Speaking of fire down the street, we did actually have one right here in the neighborhood; last Friday night a house burned to the ground. There were 4 fire crews up here including our own Hondo crew, which we are so fortunate to have right at the bottom of the road. It was a pretty tense evening, and of course, just like with the fire on Mother’s Day, I was actually not at home at the time. I was taking a girls’ night out with my sister and her friend while M. had his poker gang over at our house, and there I was in the Georgia O’Keeffe museum watching the little film about her house in Abiquiu when my phone started ringing. Then I spent the next 20 minutes in the lobby, fielding calls from my neighbors, sending texts, checking in with neighbors who were evacuating, trying to pinpoint the location of the fire via the fire crews, etc etc etc. I stayed downtown with my sister long enough to have dinner, since I might not have been able to get all the way up the road anyway with all those firetrucks, and when I got home around 9 or so they were still there.

It’s such a sad situation; the homeowners weren’t home, but their dogs were inside, and apparently succumbed to smoke inhalation. I can only imagine their grief; they’re a young couple, and he was out of town; she was working. While some calls were made to immediate neighbors, because the firefighters did not evacuate anyone, we stayed focused on the people at hand, trying to keep track of whether or not there would be a broader evacuation. We only had the landline number for the homeowners and never realized til later that had we thought to send an email, they might have gotten it on their cellphones. As it was, I was able to send an email to the neighborhood list by about 9:00; I don’t know if the fire crew would have let her near the house any sooner, but I wish I had thought of that.

Late in the evening I was talking to one of the neighbors nearby the house who had been out with a garden hose earlier when the fire jumped into the arroyo (which could have been an epic disaster if the infernal wind we’ve been battling with for months hadn’t eerily decided to stop dead still for a few days); he said he could hear screaming in the dark and figured she had just gotten home. I’m absolutely haunted by the image that conveys. Other neighbors who had reported it, directed the fire trucks to it and battled with hoses and shovels are grief-stricken that they didn’t realize the dogs were inside. With fire both outside and inside the house, it’s a mystery yet how it started or what was the cause.

I called a colleague of mine at the newspaper the next morning because the homeowner turned out to be someone fairly well-known in the local music community; with that one phone call, I am amazed to see how many people have been touched by this. This weekend is a benefit for them at a local nightclub, with a raffle and a silent auction; there is a PayPal account set up for donations; several neighbors have offered their guesthouses and spare rooms; and Facebook is amazingly bringing in donations from friends of friends of friends.

Me, I’m just sick about it. I sit up here in paradise and am a nervous wreck. Today the haze has cleared, there is a light breeze, temps in the low 80s, it’s positively perfect. Yet I’m having great difficulty getting to a place of peace within myself. It’s hard to sit here on the back porch and look at the trees and the sky and think anything bad could ever happen. And yet, the word “arson” escaped the lips of the fire dept. chief last night at a county fire-prevention meeting. I haven’t had that confirmed yet by the homeowner, who said he would let me know after he talked to the fire inspector…and I can imagine how traumatic that would have been…

And so I am just trying to stay calm and quiet, doing my best to remember that “in this moment NOW, there are no problems,” as I always try to remind others…I’ve also been trying to get myself out and about a bit more, stop feeling so chained to this house. Much as I love to soak up the solitude and quiet when I can, I have also realized how isolated and alone I feel here. I’m trying to find a happy medium; after 4 years you’d think I’d have it figured out, but the difference between the school year (when the weeks just ram bam up against each other and there are always so many things to do be done in a short amount of time) and the summer months (when schedules are a little more fluid though apparently just as busy) is, well, night and day. Getting that extra half hour or so of sleep in the morning knowing that no one has to leave the house before 8:30 or 9:00 at least, always makes a world of difference. Even so, I’m finding I resent all the driving I’m doing if I want to do anything other than sit in the peace and quiet; add a teenager’s need for friends and activity into the mix and you can guess how my days are going.

Something I’ve tried to do to keep my mind off my worries is play tourist in Santa Fe. When the wind is not blowing 50 mph (and not carrying pounds of toxic ash with it) it’s been positively lovely to stroll Canyon Road and the Railyard, eating in places that are off my beaten path, stepping into galleries for a moment of respite. I don’t spend nearly enough time actually ENJOYING all the beauty Santa Fe has to offer. My cousin and her friend were here over Memorial Day, and I spent some time strolling the Plaza with them, visiting a few shops, having breakfast at Tia’s…they seemed particularly taken by a hole in the wall coffee joint called Holy Spirit Espresso which is often proclaimed to the best coffee in Santa Fe. I’m currently not drinking coffee in an effort to save my stressed adrenals, but I did decide to have a cuppa once I realized this was the same guy who used to have a coffee cart in the mall about 10 years ago…and I remembered that he made the best coffee ever.

I’m still writing about the local food supply for the newspaper and working at the shop a couple days a week. Your whirlwind travels back East sound both groovy and horrendous; are you doing NYC, P-Town and Chicago all in the same trip? Much as I whine about never getting off this mesa, I think I would explode from that much stimulation crammed into a short trip. On the other hand, I am contemplating a trip to Chicago myself this summer to visit a friend; remember when we went to Chicago a hundred years ago to see the O’Keeffe exhibit at the museum there and wound up in a crowd gaping at Liza Minelli at one of the department stores? Um, that was fun. I remember hitting a few bars and dancing to early ’80s music and feeling like college had never ended, even though that was, what, some 10 years after the fact?

It sounds like you have some busy times coming up, and I hope you have the weather you want for it. And when, by the way, did the weather become such a preoccupation? It seems like we never thought about the weather when we were younger. Now, all I think of is, hot? dry? cloudy? rain? how much snow? how many inches? will it be windy? HOW hot? I guess this is in direct proportion to how weird the weather has gotten lately; it’s just one weather-related disaster after another.

On that note, I wish you calm skies at Manzanitas; enjoy a lovely pinot noir for me at your local wine bar (no, I’m not drinking either these days, ref. stressed adrenals above) and have a blast in NYC and P-Town. Aaaahhhh, P-Town, I know it’s not the same place it was that time we went a million years ago ( I wonder whatever happened to that Lobster Pot sweatshirt I bought that time?? Did we even eat there, or did I just buy it because it was black and pink? I wore it for years….) but I’m sure you’ll have a good time….I’ll be thinking of you!

xox~c