Notable Books, According to Me

Awoke this morning feeling good about life, about living in a place where the air is sweet and fresh, where you need a jacket to sit outside in July to drink your coffee, where the main sounds are the crows cacking and the tickle of squirrels climbing up the barky pine trees. Yes, this house is small, but it has a beautiful ceiling. It rained yesterday. The roof leaked a little over in the corner by the television. It's the first real rain we've had since we bought the place. I found a flashlight to check for other possible leaks, ran the spotlight up and down the ceiling beams. I found a lot of cobwebs, but no other wet places.

I've seen ceilings before that this one is patterned after -- on old adobe porches primarily. Long beams spaced about three feet apart, with planks adjoining in a perpendicular fashion. The boards on the ceiling here are knotty pine and smooth, with rougher beams that are actually supportive and not just decorative. These beams extend through the exterior wall and out to the edge of the porch overhang. On the porch the beams are painted, but inside they have been left natural to darken with age. Now, that the paneled walls inside have all been painted a light off-white, the beauty of the ceiling really strikes out. And now that I have inspected them with a flashlight, the ceiling has also been de-cobwebbed.

The atmosphere here is really conducive to reading and I have been getting a lot of that done. Don't know why I seem to have no time for reading when I'm at home in Texas. I downloaded some books to my Kindle before we left Texas. Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragnoso is the first one I read. It's about a woman's relationship with a pedophile, and is particularly timely with the Jaycee Dugard story so much in the news right now. It was one of those books that hangs with you, disturbs you and makes you try to rationalize. Also downloaded was Remember Ben Clayton by my friend Stephen Harrigan. Stephen is another writer who hales from Corpus Christi, which is our only real connection. He's a wonderful writer and this novel is his best to date. I'm finding it fresh and factual, particularly since it's dealing with a time period I researched considerably for Right From Wrong, and his characters are lively and real. I'm not completely finished with it, and plan to say more about it later.

One thing I have found with all this reading is how easy to handle and convenient the Kindle is. It doesn't tire my hands out the way a real book does, and mine has a little light attached to the cover, so I can read in the dark, which I have been doing for a while every night before I go to sleep. The one thing that is not handy about the Kindle, though, is that it is easy to lose your place, and you never know what page you're on at any given time. There's a bookmark, but it isn't always easy to get back to the mark if you happen to accidentally hit the paging button a few times. The other thing you miss out on with a Kindle, is photographs that might be inside the actual book.

This is the main reason I bought from Barnes & Noble online, with a birthday gift certificate, a book called River of Traps by William DeBuys & Alex Harris. It's about these two men's years living in the New Mexico mountains in the shadow of the Truchas Peaks, and an old Hispanic man who befriended them. Harris is the photographer and there are some lovely full-page black-and-whites inside, and the descriptions and history of the area are beautifully told by DeBuys. The old man, Jacobo, is wise and witty and so familiar to me of similar men I had friendships with during my years of living and working in San Antonio.

Finally, there's a bookmobile that comes to our village once a month from up at Cimarron, which is about halfway between here and Raton. In June, I got a card and checked out two books, one of which turned out to be a lovely, informative treatment of The Mountains of New Mexico by Robert Julyan. The author has visited each of the mountains he discusses, gives so much information about the geography and how the land was formed, that even though I had originally intended to only peruse it for mountains in our area, I ended up reading the entire book cover to cover, and took it with us when we visited the Capulin Volcano when the boys were here. I'm one of those people who needs to know where I am in the world, in a much more detailed way than just by giving an address or distance from some larger town. I still feel a lot of mystery around me here, and won't quit reading until I think I understand this place, its people, its present and its past.

Meanwhile, it's time to take a shower and get this day started. It's nearly noon and I've done nothing but read, drink my coffee, and listen to the birds in the trees.

Onward ....

A Bee Hummingbird in the New Mexico Mountains

Last night, just at dusk, we saw a bee hummingbird. There's red penstemon growing wild all around us, and one of the flower heads was moving. An almost incandescent fluttering caught our attention. My SO said, "How small is the smallest hummingbird you've ever seen?" I thought at first we were watching a dragonfly. So I moved over to stand still among the penstemons to get a closer look. It took a while for the tiny bird to come back, but it finally did, and my gosh, it was the teensiest, no more than two inches, if that, with wingbeats so quick they were invisible.

We are in a beautiful place, in the Sangre de Cristo range of the Rockies in northeastern New Mexico. Rociada is the name of the place. We found it last year and determined to come stay here in the future. The future is now, as they say. The owners call it an RV Resort, and if any place qualifies, this does. It encompasses 158 gated acres, so each site is as large as a city lot, with magnificent ponderosa pine towering overhead. There's an adjacent golf course and we think a lot of the people here have come here for the course. There's also a clubhouse with planned activities, which we probably won't participate in, but it's nice that they have activity directors and keep such a close watch on everything. There's no television, which has taken a little getting used to, just for the noise factor. But we sat outside until dark last night, then came inside, talked for a while, and took magazines to bed to read.

I'm pleased with how well the cat and dog are coexisting in such close confines. The cat sleeps with us, which for him is the only joy to camping, and the dog makes her bed on the sofa in the front room of the RV. She cooperates by laying her head at the opposite end from where the cat's food and water are on top of the side table, so he can jump up there unimpeded throughout the night. The dog spends most of the time outside with us. But last night, after the park had quieted, I even harnessed and leashed the cat and took him out with us. Mostly, he was panicked, but I think he enjoyed looking around from the safety of my lap.

We have no neighbors to the front of our trailer, and our friends from home occupy the space behind us. We put one of the picnic tables between our trailer and their motorhome. I fixed a big salad with leftover garlic roasted chicken, and they contributed bagel crisps and meat-stuffed empanadas. Our friend had a birthday the day before, so I had found a small fudge cake decorated with slivered marbled chocolate. We put one candle in it, my SO supplied the fire, and we took it out to the table singing Happy Birthday. I think we surprised her.

Today we're off to Taos. My SO has some business there, and then we're going to the downtown plaza for lunch and to tour Kit Carson's home, and maybe to see the Indian pueblo there. Mainly, though, we need to study how far and difficult the drive is, because we'll be going back through Taos tomorrow on our way to the narrow gauge railhead at the southernmost edge of Colorado.

Nice and cool here this morning. That's what we came for -- the cool weather. We'll have our coffee out under the awning.

Onward ....